School Days, circa 1950

It seems like every kid in America these days rides a schoolbus to school. That wasn't always the case, of course. My grandfather used to tell us how he had to walk to school--with holes in his shoes, and uphill both ways. And I had to walk to school, too, at least when I missed the dinosaur.

Seriously, I did have to walk to school. We didn't have school buses. Back then only rural kids had school buses. So I walked, to elementary school and high school. During elementary school years, I walked to and fro, not only morning and afternoon, but to go home for lunch, too. There was no lunch served by the school, everyone had to go home for lunch. And my mother worked, so I was a latchkey kid before the term had been coined.

My elementary school was probably not much different from the ones my parents had attended. The classroom had a big, old-fashioned (even then) crank-up phonograph. I don't think it had one of those horns, though. When we learned to write, we used a pencil, until—I think it was in the third grade—we were grown up enough to make the big jump to INK!

In preparation for that big move, every kid had to make a pen wiper at home and bring it in to school. This was two small squares of cloth with a large button in the middle sewn through the two layers of cloth.

Once we made the move to ink, we were issued a long black wooden pen holder and a steel nib. Every student's desk had an inkwell in the top, and the teacher would mix up the ink in a tall glass bottle, and then come around to every desk and pour some ink into each kid's inkwell. Of course this came with all sorts of cautions to us kids, such as about not trying to take the inkwell out of the desk while it had ink in it. Supposedly the thing to do, as a prank, was to grab one of the long hair braids of the girl sitting in front of you and dip it into your inkwell; but I don't think anyone actually did that. Probably because girls weren't still wearing their hair in braids.
Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein