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About Country School
© by Abraham Lincoln
Miss Beatrice Brown, our old maid schoolteacher, also had rules for
playing ball. We were never permitted to use a "hard" ball. It was a
big "soft" ball or nothing. And she refused to buy more than one bat
and then only after the other one had been broken. By the way, the
taxpayers did not have to pay any property taxes for this equipment.
The children collected things like scrap metal and old newspapers and
milkweed seedpods to sell to scrap dealers—the collected materials were
used for the “War Effort.” It was all stored in the other classroom.
The school had two rooms but the smaller of the two was our school room
and the big room was for storage.
The proceeds from those sales were more than enough to buy the things
we played with. I might mention that nobody rode a school bus to or
from school—we all walked the 1/2 mile to school and the one-half mile
back to town. I always thought it was a mile each way but then I also
thought the Little Room at school was larger than the big gymnasium at
Arcanum High School. And then one day I stopped and looked in the old
school house and that Little Room was not much larger than my office is
today—though it did have high ceilings. I wonder why I thought it was
so big?
Miss Brown taught, reading, writing and arithmetic. With reading went
spelling. Arithmetic was a social disease we all caught and hated. Bill
Bechtol (who would become a superintendent of schools in Troy, Ohio and
Waco, Texas) was our only source for solutions to problems in
arithmetic. He loved arithmetic. I loved writing and spelling and it
was reflected in my grades—all A's.
I still like writing and spelling and my wife of 57 years; Pat, thinks
I am a living dictionary. Miss Brown also taught some history but you
had to be in the 5th grade to get it and there were some geography
lessons for those higher grades. But we all sat there at our wooden
desks with the hole for the bottle of ink and listened to her teach the
kid or kids in the first grade, the second grade and the other grades
until she got through with the big kids in the 8th grade. So we heard
all the lessons for all the kids in all the grades, not once but all
year long. And the little kids in the first few grades got a recess to
go outside and play between their classes.
By the time we had "graduated" from our country school and were given
the choice to go on to work or to go on to high school so we could go
to college, we knew everything already and Miss Brown had taught us.
Miss Brown also had the parental right to spank, or whip, kids who did
bad things and got caught. For minor things she had a paddle something
like a ping pong paddle with a longer handle and with a couple of round
holes drilled in it.
She spanked boys and girls alike through their clothes. If you did
something really nasty you had to pull your drawers down and suffer the
pains of wood on flesh. There were times when she used the leather
strop that was once used to sharpen razors on but you had to do
something really bad to get whipped with that. It happened once when I
was in school there and the boy who got whipped with it also had to
pull his pants down. His fault has been looking at girls in their
privy. He had also paid one girl a nickel for her to pull her pants
down and show her butt so just looking in the girl’s toilet didn't seem
as bad to me but then I wasn't Miss Brown and I didn't know much.
Those were the days when the Japanese were killing people all over the
world and had just bombed Pearl Harbor. And the Germans were marching
into Poland. The world was at war and we had just got involved. Our
little schoolhouse would never be the same.
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