Just as we recently lost the last of the living World War I vets, time will remove, perhaps in the turn of another generation, the last of the women who taught in a one-room schoolhouse.
But for an hour last Thursday, three of the most charming such specimens from this neck of the Midwest stood before an audience of more than 50 and, with sturdy voices, relayed their memories of life in a country school.
At 17 years old, fresh out of junior college at Fort Scott, Bonita Holeman was in need of a job. One day she received word that the teacher at the Pleasant Ridge School, in Bourbon County, had just left her post. And so, without delay, Holeman straddled her horse and rode the 5 or 6 miles down the road to apply.
“Well,” Holeman said, looking back nearly 75 years, “I got it. And, once there, I was cook, janitor, nurse, and teacher of all grades.”
The great variety of duties that awaited a teacher at a one-room schoolhouse was a key feature of Thursday’s panel discussion at the Iola library.
“You had to sweep the floor, wash the boards, carry in your coal, and then, in winter, build your fire,” Holeman recalled. “And of course we only had one bucket of water and one dipper. For everybody.”
“Once a week I tried to go around and check their hands to make sure they had washed them well and that there was no impetigo going around,” remembered Mary Louise Wilson, who, around the same time, began her teaching career at the Limestone School, also in Bourbon County, about 3 miles north of Bronson.
“But the thing I still think about are the hot lunches,” said Wilson. “That was quite a job, especially for someone right out of high school, fixing lunches for all those children. I’ll tell you, I didn’t think when I started to teach school that I would be holding a book in my left hand and stirring a spoon with my right.”
Wilson had only one rule when it came to food — “They had to at least taste it” — but plenty of rules when it came to her classroom. She would start every year with a list.
“I would tell them that, in later life, they will have rules too, and that it will be necessary to obey them.” A few of Wilson’s classroom basics: No whispering. No chewing gum. No leaving the school grounds without permission. Also, a student must use special hand signals if she wanted to leave her desk.
“Hold up one finger — that let you go sharpen your pencil,” recalled Wilson. “Hold up two and you could go to the restroom outdoors.”
(At one point in the program, a woman in the audience was so moved by the memory of her school outhouses that she had to chime in: “Our school had two outhouses. One for boys and one for girls. And they were fancy — they were two-holers!”)
But rules weren’t a casual luxury in a one-room schoolhouse, where there were often dozens of kids packed into a class, sometimes ranging in age from 6 to 20. They were necessary.
Playing hooky was the most common infraction in those years. Wilson recalled a couple of boys who hid out in the pasture for a day instead of attending lessons. Every now and then she’d see them pop up on a distant haystack, then jump down again and scamper off.
“They were having a playful day. Well, when they came back to school, I told them: ‘You’ve been playing, so now you have to make up the time that you were playing and we were working.’ Oh, they cried — they said, ‘Oh, no, ma’am! Why, we didn’t think you’d do that! We thought you’d spank us and you couldn’t hit hard enough for it to hurt!’”
