one room schools????

On another thread I was talking about the one room schools we attended here in the mountains. It was so cold you wore your hat coat and mittens and boots most days in the winter and it was good to sit clost to the old coal furnace. The only reading material we had except fot outdated textbooks which actually went up tp World War 1 was an outdated set of encyclopedias. We played football on a hillside on all but the worst days. We sang once a day and read some poetry and that was our social time. We played a game with erasers on our heads called johnny jump up and the last one to lose their eraser was the winner. In those days girls wore their hair up high so they used everything imaginable as a ploy to hold the eraser on their heads. We hid easter eggs even in eights grade and always had a christmas play. Lunch was brought from home and noone had a telephone,television or a computer. We played ball every evening in the meadow with the cows and horses and in summer we went to the creek swimming after the hay was "tramped down" in the mow whch was the kids job or the corn huskjs were set up and tied in autumn. everyone had dahlias and glads which they traded freely and columbines and "pineys"(peonies) and grape arbors and tree swings made of old tires and none had a car but the teachers and on Sunday the road was full of people walking to church (I go there today and sometimes there are three of us and on a good sunday mabe 12)The local hearse was the ambulance and the ground never showed between Thanksgiving and April and it was not unusual to have snow lying on the banks on Memorial Day. On weekends because there were no cars the road was an open toboggan slide. The only school bus on the mountain would take folks eight miles to the old theater on Saturdays where one got in for 25 cents ans the popcorn was a dime for a big bag. I saw Snow White there for the first time Noone even had water and electricity finally came to us n 1944. I rmember during the war years even in the country where we were blacking out our windows at night in case a stray enemy plane came to America and mixing the coloring in the oleo. Ration books were valuable and necessary. People knew everyone for twenty miles in any direction and all there business too and there wasnt any crime going on because noone drove and when I was in high school only one boy had a car. Any memory chords struck here?? Could todays young students cope if life changed tomorrow for America and someetimes I wish I was back sitting on the front porch again singing to the top of my lungs just for the jy of singing.

I can't carry a tune in the proverbial bucket but I'd love to sit on that porch with ya and humm along!

couldnt carry one either but noone cared. noone even as ,uch as owned a guitar. People played the mouth organ as they called it or even pit wax paper over a hair comb and hummed along. We called it a zither. Music was actually sung that you could understand the words to and a singer sure enough have a decent voice because synthecized music hadnt come along yet.

I learned after I was an adult with a piano and some sheet music that many of the tunes I had learned from listening to my tone deaf grandmother were totally off. "Barbara Allen" wass a different song when she sang it, more like "Barbry Alan", and in who knows what key she would pick for the day. It depended on her mood and how tired she was and a multitude of things. And I was amazed when some of our city cousins wanted to take foxfire home with them. They wouldn't wash their hands after getting it on them. Mornings are so much more bearable when they start out around a fireplace or a woodburning stove, with the smell of home cured bacon or ham, tender biscuits and a pot of boiled coffee, with a supply of homemade syrup, jams, jellies and preserves and plenty of homemade full strength butter. We thought oleo was a luxury! Sliced bread was really high cotton, and catsup in a bottle was only for restaurants, since ours was in quart jars and made at home when there were tomatoes left after the soup and stuff was laid in. The barn loft always smelled like a mix of hay, corn and rotting onions, since that was most of what was there. The smell of manure in its various stages was just part of the deal, and chicken manure was spread on the garden site that never saw a bag of commercial fertilizer. Floors were almost all bare, and some were even dirt, and the walls didn't have anything inside to cover the studs for a long time. We had some 2x4s nailed into the studs to use for setting the Vick's and other necessities on, and over at least one doorway was a rifle, in addition to the one leaning against the door frame. The men went out hunting, at night with smelly carbide lamps, or in the morning with homemade "callers", and brought back squirrels, rabbits, coons, ducks, doves, quails, blackbirds, and even fox. After a long day, we bathed in a galvanized tub, usually all in the same water, dried off with a feed sack towel Grandma had embroidered, and sat on the porch steps, while the adults sat in the cow hide bottomed rockers or straight chairs or in the homemade swing. If fireflies were out, we would chase them, always with someone telling us not to get all sweaty before bedtime. Neighbors would drift by casually, sit a spell and go home, or we would all get together at one house and have a dance. Those were good times, seeing our adults having fun and not being so strict on us. Usually no one had anything alcoholic, but the few who did were watched over. If they had a bit too much, they slept on the porch until they were alert and then left, but the family just went on about their business. It all seemed to happen spontaneously, and since there were no phones, it must have been so.

Thanks for sharing Aimee. My husband was a southern WVA boy and one of the favorite sayings he had was a man should never forget his "raisings" Lif is os fast and furious today that yesterday I just needed to remember life when it was slow and good and humbler Shirley

I never got to go to the one room school-they build a brand new school with lots of rooms when I was going into the big "K"! My sisters all went to the one room school-"cherry School" it was named. I only got to visit as it was right around the corner from us! It has now been turned into someones home!
I cant even imagine my boys going there-they'd be in shock!
As for singing-im vanilla ice-lip singing-noone wants to hear the noises that come out of this mouth!!
I remember my mom trying to teach me-she wanted me to be a saprano-im an alto or tener(tin-ear)I just couldnt hit those high notes for anything-she gave up on me!! My older sis can hit c above high c(whatever that means)she drove me nuts singing all the time. I bought my first 45 to drive her nuts-I played "A Boy Named Sue" at high as my lil record player would play and sang as loud as my off key voice would let me before cracking!
"memories"

If it's music you're talking about you've hit a "note" close to my heart. My all time favorite childhood memory is playing piano and organ duets with my Mom. We'd play so loud the neighbors would sit on their porch to listen. And the best part would be Dad singing along. I came from a musical family. Everyone sings, everyone plays instruments (yes, more than one) and we'd spend many many hours just playing and singing for ourselves. Not to "perform" for anyone. Such wonderful memories and I wouldn't have traded them for anything. "T" :)