FOR MOST OF THE CENTURY: SCHOOL DAYS AT LOUGHBORO

Jean Bell Mosley's new autobiography, "For Most of the Century," is only available in serialized form in the Southeast Missourian. Return each week for her continuing story.

Some day a definitive paen of praise will be written to the one-room rural school. They were cozy little nests of learning. The pupils were almost family. We knew each others' homes intimately, the names of their cows, horses, dogs and cats, where the closets were and what was in them, the layout of their outbuildings, what they had for breakfast and whether they prayed aloud or silently before meals and at bedtime. Some of our biggest adventures during the school year were to be allowed to stay all night at each other's homes. We stayed mostly with the McFarlands or Stacys since their homes were closer to our home.

The Loughboro school was typical of the early 20th century rural school. A big, metal, round-hooded stove was placed in one corner with racks of good dried wood behind it. The hood was ornamental bas relief. The teacher, or one of the bigger eighth-grade boys kept it stoked all day and banked the fire for the night. A wood house, separate but nearby, was filled some time during the year by the parents of the pupils, the wood being from someone's timbered hills.

Desks, graduating in size to accommodate the length of the first-graders' legs up to those of the eighth-graders,' faced forward toward the teacher's desk. These desks were seats and desks combined, the seat in front with a desk attached to the back for the use of the pupil seated behind. Ornamental black iron legs bolted them to the floor. The slanting top of the desk had a groove to hold pencils and pens and a hole to hold an ink bottle so that its contents would not be inadvertently spilled when in use. Underneath the desk top was a compartment to hold books, tablets, pencils, rulers, crayons, or any other objects the pupil wished to have, providing it didn't take up too much room. Such desks now, in the l990s, are considered antiques.

Some time before leaving school for work or higher education, some pupils, knowing their possible punishment days were over, would carve their initials somewhere in their desk top, a thing much frowned on by teachers, school board members and the more fastidious pupils. Such carvers were seldom ever caught in the act. It was a sort of valedictory rite for those ending their school years at the little schoolhouse atop the hill.

Rows of small paned windows were on each side of the schoolhouse. There were no blinds, drapes, curtains or screens. Wasps, mud daubers and sometimes even butterflies wandered in and out of the opened windows before cold weather demanded they be closed. If a grasshopper made a huge arc and landed somewhere inside it was caught and either put down the back of someone's dress or shirt or into a box for the nature study class. I suppose those windows were washed before school started each year, but I don't think they were ever washed after school started.

It was good to have a desk by a window, even though it might be a cold spot in winter. There wasn't much to see going on outside, though, because the schoolhouse was in a little clearing in the woods. But one could see the woods softly filling up with snow in winter or dripping with rain in the spring and fall. Maybe someone's hound passed by occasionally or even a foraging pig or two.

Once a man on a horse rode rapidly around the schoolhouse shouting, "Vote for Coolidge! Vote for Coolidge!" The horse and rider were so close to the windows I could have reached out and touched the horse's flying tail. But we all drew back toward the center of the room in surprise and almost fear. No one recognized the horse or rider. Elva Russell, the biggest boy, got up and locked the door for fear on his next journey around, the horse might come right up the front steps and down the center aisle.

After the horse and rider had disappeared, his voice receding in the distance toward the river, Miss Mary, our teacher, explained that it was the year when our country was to elect a new president and that this fellow on the horse had chosen to campaign in this manner. This was 1924. I was in the fifth grade and, of course, knew that the head of our country was a president, but this was my first experience with campaigning methods. That's what Miss Mary laughingly told us it was. "Just someone's enthusiasm to get folks to vote for Coolidge." Since none of us except the teacher was old enough to vote, I assimilated it all as more of a modern day Paul Revere's Ride: T'was in the year of twenty-four. Horse and rider came shoutin' by. Scared us to the very core. Vote for Coolidge was his cry!

In the corner opposite the big stove was a small walled-off space. One side was shelved to hold the lunch buckets, the other side was studded with rows of nails upon which to hang coats and sweaters. Winter overshoes, smelling much of barnyards, were all piled in a congenial heap on the floor at the back of this space.

Just inside the door, on a small homemade table, was the galvanized two-gallon water bucket and communal granite dipper. Some more squeamish pupils used the dipper to fill their collapsible tin drinking cups which they carried in their pockets or kept in their desks. Some drank directly from the dipper and put it back into the bucket.

Water came from a cistern a few feet away from the right front of the building. Filling the empty water bucket from the pump, dusting the erasers (beating them together outside to remove most of the chalk dust), washing the blackboard were all little chores that somehow was regarded as being given to the best behaved children.

In addition to the windows being washed before school started, the wooden, narrow planked floor was oiled to keep down the dust.

At this time of advertising for Lifebuoy soap, little sample bars were provided for the pupils. There was a wall chart accompanying the samples. The teacher inspected our hands upon arriving at school, to see if they were Lifebuoy clean, and if they were, we got a gold star put on the chart beside our name. I believe that Lifebuoy provided the gold stars too. This was the first Lifebuoy soap made and it smelled strongly of carbolic acid. Not an altogether unpleasant odor, just clean. It was probably the first time any of the pupils got a gold star for anything although they had milked hundreds of cows, howed miles of corn or put up 500 loads of hay into the barn loft.

The combined odor of all the little boxes of crayons, the oiled floors, filled lunch boxes, chalk dust, little, middle-sized and big bodies and cedar penny pencils combined to produce an odor that could only be called One-room Rural Schoolhouse.

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.