SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE WESTERNER

Back to school—now and then

By Julie Carter

The kiddy song goes “the wheels on the busses go round and round….. all through the town.” Once again it is time for the big yellow vehicles to be put back in gear to carry children to the school houses for another season.

It is a decades old routine that often brings with it a wave of nostalgia for many, me included. There are at least three and sometimes four generations of America’s students that can still recall how much different things were “back then.”

I started school in a one-room country school house along with a less than a dozen others in grades one through eight. I began in the first grade with three other children because they either hadn’t invented kindergarten yet or it hadn’t reached the rural mountain regions of Southern Colorado.

We shared one teacher, a huge wood stove in the middle of the room and a chalk board that was filled with everything from primer words to eighth grade math problems. And yes, Dick, Jane and “go Spot go” were part of my formative years.

We all brought sack lunches as there was no lunch program—free or otherwise. We had a “Boys” and a “Girls” bathroom option in the form of wood outhouses at the back of the school yard. To this day I don’t recall if they were one or two holers.

Recess offered baseball, a set of swings with board seats complete with splinters and the usual playground games that required no equipment, only imagination. The apple tree at the back of the school yard carried the legend that it had begun when students from earlier years had thrown their lunch apple cores in a pile in that spot. I thought that was a magical story.

We had a Christmas play on a small stage that became available by removing part of a wall between the classroom and the backroom of the school house. I can remember being terrified to stand alone and sing my part of Jolly Old St. Nicholas. Now that I am aware of my lack of musical ability I know there were many reasons to be afraid.

Gasoline was less than 30 cents a gallon but the drive to get me from the ranch to the school was often country dirt road difficult. I spent many weeks in the winter bunking with my teacher and her family on a ranch closer to the school.

While that saved on long walks when stuck in the snow, fuel costs and wear and tear on vehicles, it often made a little girl very homesick. But I loved my teacher and still do today. She reads these columns faithfully every week.

She did what teachers are supposed to do. She sparked in me a desire to learn and the belief I could do anything I set my mind to do. Even if she did put my hair in rag curls.

The world of l958 was in transition. That unique one-room school experience lasted only a year and the tiny school at Malachite, Colorado was “consolidated” and the students bussed to nearby Gardner.

I thought I’d hit the big time. There were at least eight kids in my class. Better yet there was a filling station across the road that sold penny candy at lunch time. Things were looking up.

The Malachite school was built of rock—a foundation that formed walls up to large windows and a peaked roof that held a bell tower pointing to the blue Colorado sky above.

I’d like to believe that one important year there began to form my life in the same way--rock solid underneath and always reaching to the sky.

Julie can be reached for comment at jcarter@tularosa.net

Copyright Julie Carter 2005

===