OLD SCHOOL DAYS
Don Lively

The two old brick buildings are at the center of a controversy over what to do with them but to me they represent a huge part of my past. My elementary and junior high schools, still looking dignified years later.

Driving by the buildings now I'm reminded that I met people my first day of school who I am still friends with today. It's where my life away from the farm began. Where the world became much bigger.

Seeing the old structures brings back a flood of memories.

I remember that Mama bought me a couple of fat red pencils with no erasers and a Blue Horse writing tablet with lined sheets of paper inside. They were tucked into a brand new book satchel with my other school supplies. I could not have been prouder if I'd been carrying the Holy Grail itself.

All of the desks, no doubt old surplus items, had little round holes in the upper right hand corner. The holes were inkwells where little jars of the black writing fluid were placed for the old style pens to be dipped. Always in the upper right corner. I sometimes wondered why there were no left handed holes. The inkwells had long since gone out of use by the time I started school.

The classrooms always smelled like turpentine. The floors were wood with no rugs or carpet and were always slick and shiny. There were no reading rooms and media centers like there are in modern schools. Your day was spent in your desk facing forward.

The walls at the front of the classrooms were covered with green chalkboards. The chalk was white. After several days of wiping written instructions from the boards the chalk erasers would require cleaning. It was quite an honor to be designated by the teacher to "dust the erasers". She would send the appointed student out to the playground where there was an old tree stump that seemed to serve only one purpose, having the erasers beaten against it until all the chalk dust was on the stump and off of the erasers.

Then, as now, the kids favorite part of school was not school at all.

It was recess.

Recess meant playtime. The playground was covered with several different pieces of equipment designed to keep the students active and busy during recess.

Monkey bars. Jungle gyms. And my favorite, the Giant Strides.

It was a tall metal pole with eight chains attached to a rotating wheel at the top. At the end of each chain was a handle grip where a kid could hold on. The eight participants would run around in a circle holding onto the chains until everybody became nearly airborne. You could "fly" twenty feet or so without your shoes touching the ground. Every now and then someone would lose their grip and go flying off into the dirt tearing the knees out of their pants and scraping off a couple of layers of skin.

It was great fun but somewhere along the line somebody decided it was much too dangerous so the Giant Strides were removed along with the other apparatus.

Drive by some schools today and all you see on the playground is…ground.

These days push pins hold posters and other paper documents in place on the corkboards but back then there were thumbtacks. I feel certain that within five minutes of the first box of thumbtacks being introduced to academia, some imaginative pupil decided what fun it would be to put one pointing up in somebody's desk for that person to sit on. It's a prank that has played itself out thousands of times always with the same result. The victim would plop down on the hard seat only to have his behind pierced by the tack causing him to yelp and jump up out of the desk resulting in total disruption to the rest of the class. The teacher would try in vain to get somebody to confess to the crime. It never happened.

The end of the school day meant boarding the bus and heading home. In those days there was a tradition known as "running the tracks". When the bus would arrive at a railroad crossing a kid would be selected by the driver to get off and cross the tracks ahead of the bus, presumably to warn against approaching locomotives. I don't remember any close calls but for some reason the practice was stopped years ago.

Running the tracks. Dusting the erasers. Thumbtacks. Giant Strides. Gone. Faded into history.

I hope the same fate doesn't await the two fine old buildings.

Don Lively is a retired police officer and freelance writer. He spends his time between Shell Bluff and Charleston. Send comments or questions to Livelycolo@aol.com.