Since this is a musing, I thought I might go back many, many years ago to when I was in the seventh grade. This was in the bustling metropolis of Harrisville in Western Pennsylvania. It bustled with about 600 residents, and since we lived outside of the town limits, we were not included. We were included in the school district though.
Today, it would be easier to explain where Harrisville is, as the closest “big” community was Butler, which has been in the news the last couple of years. It wasn’t far from Grove City either, which we hitch hiked to many times.
You could hitchhike in those days without any fear.
As to the Harrisville school, it was a wooden fire hazard that should have been condemned years before we moved there. It held grades 1-12 with two grades per room. The seventh and eighth grade were on the top floor. The school board had done its duty to protect us from fire. They had built metal stairs outside a side door that we could scamper down. If things were really rough, they also had a three-story pole that you could slide down like a fireman – although I never saw anyone try it. Luckily, we never had a fire either. What we did have was a teacher who taught all subjects from math to English for both grades. She would teach one class while the other class was to study. Then she would switch sides and teach the other class. She also would pick out a book and read a chapter a day to all of us. I still recall one called “Beautiful Joe”. It was a pretty sad book about a dog. I doubt if the teacher’s union today would approve the above work schedule.
One good aspect of the school being a wooden structure was that the floors were wood with
openings in them. It was during WW ll and a number of items were rationed. One of the big ones was chocolate as far as we kids were concerned. All the candy bars went to the military. Now we could go to the holes in the floor and pull-out candy wrappers that previous students had stuck in there. They were mostly nickel chocolate bars, and they were huge. We would salivate at the sight, but we had to wait until the war ended. When it did, the first dessert I recall were marshmallows covered in some sweet concoction. That was followed by chocolate covered graham crackers. For a while Nabisco put out chocolate covered gram crackers in a box like their other crackers. They soon stopped that. Today you pay more for one chocolate gram that they did for a whole box. When actual chocolate bars came out, they were not Hershey or Nestles as you would expect. Instead, the biggie was a Suchard bar. It had a scooped-out center, but it wasn’t bad. It disappeared when the big names came out.
We lived about 1.5 miles out of Harrisville in a sparsely populated area which meant long walks to school in winter snow. It was, of course, uphill both ways! All around us were acres of various berries that my mother would send me to pick. There were boysenberries, black and red raspberries, dewberries, and my mother planted strawberries. We had all kinds of jam and jellies canned and ready to eat. We also had lots of special biscuits made for shortcakes. They would be covered in real whipped cream. We bought milk for 20 cents a gallon from a local farmer. My dad had purchased a pasteurizing machine from Sears so all was good with the milk and cream. Sometimes at dusk, I would hear the noise of airplanes flying over our house. I would look up and there would be an armada of fighters, bombers and other planes on their way to join the war effort.
Nostalgia can be all it’s cracked up to be!
Barry Evans is a columnist for Villages-News.com