School Days in the Two Room School House.

Moss school in about 1934;
Miss Geraldine Goulson, teacher. 

My first school was Moss, a two-room school located on what is now the Springtown highway. Then it was a gravel road leading to Springtown. There were about six school children in a small no-name community several miles east of Moss and we walked the distance in a scattered group in the mornings - a closer group in the afternoons.

No- it was not five miles in the snow and uphill both ways! It only seemed that way. It was probably less than two miles along a county road that had one section that had become impassable other than by foot or horseback, and travel by either of those means was questionable. By today's standards the entire road was impassable but this part crossed Willow Creek, a rather awesome waterway back in the days before government dams caught much of the rainwater before it gathered into a powerful run-off.

When the road had been maintained as an active roadway, the creek had a sturdy bridge with iron rails, but it was never sturdy enough to hold its own against the water that roared down Willow Creek after a heavy rain.  The rushing water filled the creek and overflowed in a brown foaming lake of water extending far beyond the creek's banks, and rearranged everything in its path. The old bridge was always left angled precariously and its repairs were usually done by man power and four-legged horse power. Until then, once it had been determined that the bridge was not going to completely collapse, our group of school children found the spot where the bridge still touched the creek bank and walked across the caterwauled structure.

Each year at the end of August, the men of the community would take teams and plows and go to the impassable section and plow a path through the tall Bermuda grass and weeds to enable us to walk without getting soaked from the morning dews and to be relatively safe from whatever might be lurking in the weedy growth. As "bottom land" land enriched by years of overflow, the Bermuda grass grew almost knee high and Johnson grass and Blood weeds were head high.

Foreseeing that there would be a time when a heavy rain during the school day might make the creek rise to a dangerous level, my mother made arrangements for me to spend the night safely with a family near the school. It did happen, and I was put to bed wearing my classmate's long-johns. How we kids had perfect attendance records is a puzzle, but unless you were ill, you went to school, rain or shine. In all those years I remember only a sprinkling of snow!

There were no fancy backpacks in those days; those were Depression years and we were fortunate to have shoes much less anything as fancy as a purchased carrier for books. Instead, there were homemade book satchels, usually made of canvas and having a wide shoulder strap to ease the burden of a load of books.

I suppose the school building had wide folding doors dividing the "little",  room from the "big"  room, (little referring to the first four grades and big to the next four). School buildings were used for both school activities and those of the community. School plays and monthly community singing, plus Sunday School and church services were part of the buildings double life.

There was one teacher for each room of children. Each class was arranged in rows across the room and the teacher moved from row to row, teaching each class their reading, writing or arithmetic-and spelling. Spelling was livened by spelling bees and winning made the student the proud owner of some dime store
doodad. Pretty things such as a barrette or tiny doll or a ball could be bought for a nickel or dime and the teachers of those days were the same as those of today - they dug into their own pockets for special treats for the kids. Until recently, I still had a small china elephant pin cushion that I once won.

I remember the Bob and Nancy readers and being an avid reader even at six years, I rushed through the entire book, making the reading class boring. We had flash cards for numbers, Big Chief writing tablets and a long wall of blackboards. My mother tried to teach me to write the way she was taught...by what was known as the Palmer Method. In that system, the writer rolled their writing arm on its underside, swinging the writing hand to form the letters. No cramped hand movement was allowed. One's letters were supposed to match those on a transparent writing chart. I failed all her efforts, hated handwriting in school and still do.

As the diphtheria vaccine was successfully reducing the illness, there was a special campaign to vaccinate all school children before school started in my first year of school. I expect that was a public health service throughout the nation, as in the '20s thousands of children were dying of this disease.

As a child, recesses and the noon lunch time seemed much longer than those in later years. We had time to choose sides and play team games or to swing or play on the see saws. All games were very active ones, often sending us home with badly skinned knees that scabbed and got hurt again and again. Looking back, scabbed knees appear to have been constant companions the same as those of missing teeth.

The games we played are mainly unheard of today and although we generally escaped serious injury, I'm sure many would be considered too dangerous for todays youngsters. There was Wolf Over the River, a game that involved a player attempting to break through a line of hand holding kids; there was Pop the Whip, a game of a line of running youngsters attempt to "pop" off the end of the line player, usually making that person fall, (another skinned knee). We played Hide and Seek and another hiding game called Sheep Board Down that involved knocking down "IT's" leaning board with getting caught and having to stand in the "mush pot." Please don't expect me to explain these names! Their meanings and/or pronunciation were probably corrupted by several generations of children before I even heard the words.
A few tamer ones were also popular. Drop the Handkerchief and Flying Dutchman and a blindfolded name guessing one were a few.  I doubt if the cold ever slowed us much but a heavy rain surely confined us inside with marbles, and jacks and that very best part of school--drawing paper and crayons!

In one of the running and hiding games, I remember fondly being "adopted" by one of the larger boys in the "big" room and carried on his shoulders as we raced around the building. It may have been the tall fellow in this photograph, a fellow who years later became a neighbor, or it may have been a boy I remember as being Robert Moore or maybe Maughon--- that was many years ago. I remember the Woodle boy who also swooped me up during running games. In later years one of his daughters was in my first Scout troop and I was saddened by his accidental death.

The school rooms seemed large then, even larger in cold weather when the huge cast iron stove could not produce enough heat to reach the rooms far corners. I'm sure the stove was at least five feet in height and probably had a diameter of three or four feet -- maybe more at it's pot-bellied widest spot. Each of the three schools I attended was heated by this type although heated is an exaggeration of the  rooms winter temperatures.

The old Moss school building still stands a short distance outside the city limits. Many years ago the property was sold by the school district and the building converted into a residence. Our old school obstacle course of a road is now paved and a modern bridge crosses the once mighty Willow Creek.
The little creek that had a bridge with no rails, permitting one of the older girls to swing me out over the edge in devilment, is hardly noticeable and the hour-long (kid time) walk home takes only minutes by automobile.