The month of September never comes without thinking back to the start of school in my small town, or the last years when I became a teacher myself.

In my old memories, school always started on Tuesday mornings after Labor Day. As in the 1950s movie “Picnic”, Labor Day was celebrated as the start of fall. Summer was over and it was time to collect some pencil boxes, new Crayolas and Big Chief tablets and head to school.

My school in Dallas County housed and taught all twelve classes in one building. It was a one-story red brick structure, and there were two entrances at each end facing the street. The left entrance led to the elementary classes. The entrance on the right led to the upper classes, 7-12. Inside was a stage and an auditorium in the center of the building dividing the two levels.

When I climbed three steps at age 12, crossed the stage wing, and descended three more steps, I was in another world. I was suddenly in what was then called Junior High.

At the front of my first elementary school room was the locker room and it served three purposes. In winter, we used to go there to hang up our coats and sweaters. There was a shelf just above the coat rack to store lunch bags until noon. And for punishment, the misbehaving student was often sent to the locker room for the rest of the hour.

I entered first year in September 1949. My first and second years were taught in the same room by Miss Julia. While she was teaching one class, the other class was busy filling out pages in their workbooks. It didn’t sound strange to us at all, and the “Workbook” group never made a sound while she was teaching across the room. Miss Julia taught first graders to read from a book starring Alice and Jerry (not Dick and Jane) and they had a dog named Jip. “See the red ball, Alice?” Https://www.eldoradonews.com/news/2021/sep/26/miles-of-memories-school-marks-the-beginning-of/ “Run to Jerry, Jip ! “

Each morning we started our day with a Bible reading and a prayer for our safety and our focus on learning. The scroll was taken by the professor who was watching our desks.

On Monday morning, the money for the lunch ticket was collected. Tickets cost $ 1 for the week and the days were punched out every noon by the lady in the dining room. Those who ate lunch bags and those who ate the dining room meals all sat together at long tables. The elementary students first walked in single file and sat at the first two tables, and a few minutes later the “big kids” came in and brought their food to the back tables. Their teachers did not have to sit with them, but rather sat at a round table in the space between the lower and upper class tables. The teachers’ table had salt and pepper shakers.

As a “city kid”, I could come home during lunch hour if I wanted to, but I rarely did. The cooks in the dining room were the mothers of my friends and their homemade meals served with yeast buns, cupcakes and cobblers were delicious. How the school could afford them with so little money, I’ll never know.

Our clothes ? The girls wore dresses and the boys wore long pants. Some boys started the year barefoot until the school board made a rule in third grade that shoes should be worn by everyone. It was common to wear the same clothes all week. When it was cold Mom made me wear corduroy pants under my dress.

The teachers were demanding and demanding. We were made to memorize parts of sentences and know how to diagram them. We were also forced to memorize our arithmetic tables and our higher mathematical theorems without using calculators, which were not yet available at the time; slide rules were fashionable for the more studious.

My grade 10 and 11 teacher, Miss Mary, gave me the only creative writing experience I still draw on today.

It was not at all uncommon for a teacher to have two classes in elementary school or more than one subject in higher grades. In total, I only had a total of nine different teachers during my 12 years of schooling. Yet, looking back, I cannot question the quality of the education I received in this small school.

Out of my class of only 17 students came out some very successful students. One of them became vice president of Anthony Timberland, Inc., the state’s seventh largest lumber supplier. Another had his own lumber business employing other drivers. One of them had his own State Farm franchise in Hobbs, New Mexico. One was a pilot for Continental Airlines. One is the most productive salesperson at a large Chevrolet dealership in Little Rock. And my friend in the rank above us is the largest landowner (118,000 acres) in Pulaski County.

We might have been a small school, devoid of many of the big school curricula and frills, but I would say we received a good education where we were and also learned the ‘golden rule’ and civic responsibility from teachers. teachers who really cared.

Brenda Miles is an award-winning columnist and author living in Hot Springs Village. She responds to comments sent to [email protected]