- The Journey Is The Reward – Installment 3 of 6 -
Jean Courter Marchand was born in 1921 and grew up in the Climax area. In 2000, she wrote this article on her memories and perspective of events and people she came in contact with, focusing more on the first twentytwo years of her life.
“These are my school day memories. I started school September 1927, when I was six years old. My teacher was Ruby Fox from Severy. She probably taught with a certificate earned by taking Normal Training in her senior year of high school, that is the level of training common for beginning teachers of that time. The school was Hillside School, District 13, built in 1913, and was a one room country school. School started at nine o’clock, the teacher arrived at the school building so she could start a fire in the coal furnace installed on the south side of the school room. In the winter, the north part of the room with its windows was almost always cold, and sometimes when the wind was from the north, all the pupils clustered around the furnace to keep warm. The teacher’s desk was on the east, and back of her were the blackboards. The desks were designed for two students to sit in each thirty-six-inch-wide desk. That first year, the eight grades and eighteen students almost filled those double desks. My second year in school, half those double desks were replaced by single desks. Our books went under the top, and cut into the righthand corner of each desk was a hole to hold an ink well, fountain pens were considered unsuitable for children, and ball point pens wouldn’t be invented for some years. In following years, some large families moved away, so the school had twelve pupils at a time, and some years there were only six or seven grades, rather than eight. This was an eight-month school, as most rural schools were at the time, a custom that originated in earlier days when children were needed to work on the farm during the summer months. The library consisted of a wood cabinet three feet wide with three shelves. The US flag, a set of World Books, and a dictionary were stored on the top shelf, the second shelf held the thirty books for pupils to read, (I had read all of them by sixth grade. Other pupils did not enjoy reading as I did) and the bottom shelf had a set of Book of Knowledge, about ten volumes of assorted stories, puzzles and pictures. My first exposure to foreign language came from these books, each volume had a story of two hundred words written in English and French. I learned some French by comparing the two versions.
“The day began at nine o’clock with a salute to the flag, then usually the teacher would read aloud from a story book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was one, for about ten minutes. Then reading classes would begin, with first grade first, each grade having about ten minutes in which each pupil would read aloud. Frequently, memory work was assigned and the next day, the pupil was expected to recite a poem, the preamble of the constitution, or a verse from a Longfellow poem. A fifteen-minute recess followed and we went out to the playground and ran around or to the toilets. The second period of the day was the time for arithmetic classes. Pupils were usually sent to the blackboards to write their numbers one to one hundred, to solve addition, long division or other problems appropriate for their age and class. At twelve o’clock classes recessed for an hour for lunch, at one o’clock the teacher rang the hand bell, the signal for all of us to line up, younger ones in front and march into the schoolhouse. Again, the teacher read aloud, continuing the story from earlier in the day, and then language class began. As I recall, they dealt with proper use of punctuation and contractions (including not using “ain’t,” a common part of speech in the community, distinguishing adjectives from adverbs, and how to use a dictionary. Spelling was also on the agenda. Twice a week after the afternoon recess of fifteen minutes, we had writing exercises, and using the Palmer method we practiced with a pencil, and as we got older, with a pen, doing the round and push-pull movements that were supposed to develop good penmanship, considered quite important in the day when typewriters were a rarity. In that fourth period of the day, we also had geography and history classes. We were always quite happy when four o’clock came and we could go home.
“In addition to the school building itself, there was a coalhouse. Each fall a wagon of coal was brought from Climax, seven miles away. It had arrived at Climax by train and the coal was stored in the coalhouse. We pupils had certain chores and usually the oldest boy in the school was assigned the task of bringing in a bucket of coal from the coalhouse, and in very cold weather a second bucket might be needed later in the day, this chore and others were usually welcomed because they allowed the individual to have freedom, at least for a few minutes, from sitting quietly at his desk. Other chores preformed were dusting the blackboard erasers, and sometimes washing the blackboards. My first two years of school there was a barn on the school grounds to shelter the horses that pupils rode to school or that pulled the buggy that brought them. The barn was torn down because horses were no longer bringing people to school, as the automobile had arrived. Nevertheless, unless it was raining or extremely cold, most pupils walked to and from school. Most had a distance of less than two miles one way to walk. There were two toilets, each about one hundred feet from the schoolhouse. The girls on the east and the boys on the west side. These two-seaters were not flush toilets, they were six feet by six feet buildings equipped with out-of-date Montgomery Ward or Sears and Roebuck catalogs to be used for toilet paper. These buildings were not heated; the cold and the odor did not encourage one to remain there any longer than necessary. Playground equipment consisted of two teeter totters and a couple of basketball goals. The school did own a softball and a basketball which were used, but more often the games played didn’t require equipment, like hide and seek or run sheep run, are examples.
“We children brought our lunches in dinner pails (recycled syrup buckets) and they were placed on shelves until dinner time. Dinner in that farming community was and still is at noon, not evening, the evening meal is supper. One year there was a problem when a couple of older, momentarily unsupervised, pupils at recess got into the dinner pails of other pupils and ate part of their dinners. These same people persuaded me, as a first grader, to give them most of my food. I do remember that first day of school. I was so distracted by watching all the exciting people in the room that when lunch hour was over, I had eaten almost nothing of my dinner.
“I was allowed to skip the second grade of school, so I was thirteen when I began school at Climax Rural High School as a freshman. Our farm was five miles out in the country, so each day Harold Taylor, my classmate, drove his family’s Model A Ford and took me, and usually three other passengers, to Climax. The school had a principal and three other teachers, and an enrollment that varied from fortyfive to fifty-five students. My class of eighteen, born right after World War I ended, was the largest ever to graduate from CHRS. Each of us students were enrolled in four daily classes. In addition, about half of us took a music class, orchestra and/or glee club. That left us one period for study hall.
“The school was generally the center of community activities. Part of the one room school teacher’s responsibility during the year was to provide two or three evening programs. Forty or fifty people would crowd into the school building. The two or three families who had gasoline powered Coleman lanterns brought them to provide light, as there was no electricity. All the students participated in some way. It was always necessary to have these programs at Christmas and on the last day of school. When I was in third grade a classmate and I sang a duet. Afterwards I asked Mom how I did and her reply was “It was better than I expected!” I’ve never
been able to carry a tune. Santa Claus was there at Christmas. Several times the Grundy brothers (from a family in the Climax community) entertained with instrumental music.
“After I was old enough, my extracurricular activities tended to center around the high school. The people of the community, especially the parents of most of the high school students, came to watch the home games of the boys’ basketball team. The league was made up of approximately eleven similar sized high schools in the county. It was possible to field a fiveperson basketball team, football was more difficult. Commencement and baccalaureate also brought the entire community to the school. Each fall the senior Class put on a threeact play, and each spring the Junior Class put on a similar play. Admission fees were charged for these plays and proceeds were used to fund the seniors’ gift to the school or the Junior-Senior Banquet. There was no prom, I believe the banquet filled that role. As much as I can remember, there was no mixed dancing. I recall square dancing, rather than round or ballroom dancing, was the community custom because of less intimate physical contact. In my freshman year sometimes during the noon hour some girls put a record on the portable phonograph in the gymnasium and the girls paired off to round dance. Once two rather religious girls suddenly stopped dancing and said “Was that a Christmas carol?” Evidently it was considered inappropriate to dance to music with a religious connection.
“Most of my high school teachers had graduated from Emporia State Teachers College, so they were interested in acquainting their students with that school in case college was in their future. William David Altus was our principal. He was interested in psychology, so he tested a number of us students. He also encouraged us to participate in the scholastic competition given at the College each spring. The first Saturday in May the better students traveled the sixty miles to Emporia where we, along with students from other high schools in the state, took a test in various subjects. I thought I was pretty successful, now I realize I wasn’t as talented as I thought.
“At the time I got to high school in 1934, the farm economy was in shambles following the stock market crash of 1929. It got even worse as the worst drought ever in Kansas occurred in the mid-thirties. Consequently, very few CHRS graduates went on to college. Those who did almost exclusively attended the school then known as Emporia State Teachers College, now Emporia State University. Because of my parents’ involvement with the extension service, I was somewhat familiar with Kansas State College of Agriculture and Applied Science at Manhattan, and I went there as a freshman in 1938. My parents did everything possible to help pay for my college, Mom raised turkeys and dressed and sold them at Thanksgiving time, they pinched pennies from sales of eggs and cream and somehow managed to accumulate perhaps sixty dollars for my first semester at Kansas State. However, the major money for my college came from a New Deal agency called National Youth Administration. Through that program, in the Clothing and Textiles Department, I worked fifty hours a month for thirty cents an hour and managed to pay part of my tuition ($30 a semester) and all of my living expenses for my four years of college. In the four years, my parents paid a total of about $300, simply because they could afford no more and because they and I lived at the very lowest level of spending.
“The first two years I lived at 909 Moro in Manhattan, the landlady was Mrs. Ruth Dexter, a widow age sixty, who supported herself with the income from this rooming house for college girls. There were four bedrooms upstairs with two girls in each room. In the basement there was a small apartment for another two girls. My bed was in an unheated sleeping porch and I did my studying in Mrs. Dexter’s living room/parlor. The second semester my landlady’s daughter came with her children for a visit and I was moved from the sleeping porch to the basement apartment to room with Rachel Erickson, another freshman. This was the beginning of a close friendship that has lasted for more than sixty years. She was from a Swedish farm family that was soon forced from their Blue valley farm because of the building of the Tuttle Creek Reservoir. In 1940, after my sophomore year, Rachel’s family moved to Manhattan where they operated a rooming house for college boys. They invited me to rent their sleeping porch for the same five dollars a month charge I had paid Mrs. Dexter. I accepted with pleasure. The Ericksons accepted me much as another daughter and I did what was called “light housekeeping,” meaning that I cooked my meals in their kitchen. Mrs. Erickson had to go to the Dean of Women to get permission for me to reside in the building licensed for male students, even though my living quarters were completely separate from those of the men. When I was a college student, a rooming house for women could not be located on property adjacent to a rooming house for men. Rachel and I graduated in 1942 with degrees of bachelor of Science in Home Economics.”
