RIVER CITY JOURNAL: SOMETHING IN THE AIR SAYS ITS PIE-SUPPER TIME

Yes, there were pies at the pie suppers held at the one-room schoolhouse. And there were cakewalks too, and a lot more.

There was something about the chill in the air this week that made me think it was time for a pie supper like the ones we used to have at the one-room schools I attended in the Ozark hills west of here.

Maybe you remember pie suppers too. The ones I recall were social occasions, fund raisers and matchmaking events all rolled into one. Where else could you play games, visit, eat and spark all on the same night?

I'll bet a lot of you don't even know what "sparking" is. Ask your parents.

As pie suppers go, the ones I attended were probably pretty tame. But for the farmers and loggers and hunters whose children attended the one-room schools I went to, this was the peak of the social season. As a matter of fact, it was the social season. Folks trying to grub out a few dollars from rocky fields or overcut forests don't stop to play all that often. At least not in mixed company.

I went to three one-room schools in all. I started at Shady Nook on Greenwood Valley, which was two miles over the hill from Kelo Valley where I grew up. Thanks to the hill between the valleys, I have always been able to truthfully tell my sons it was uphill both to and from school. They still don't believe the it-snowed-every-day part.

Shady Nook was a school with as many as 60 students at one time in one room with one teacher and one wood-burning stove. It had no electricity, but there were propane lanterns hanging on clothesline contraptions. The lanterns near the ceiling could be lowered -- for lighting and pumping up the fuel tanks -- by the clotheslines that traveled by pulleys to the walls.

There wasn't much technology in a school like that. Most students from that era remember well the first time a ballpoint pen showed up -- and promptly leaked all over someone's homework, which led to the edict that No. 2 lead pencils were to be used on all homework assignments.

But there was a reed organ, the kind you pump with foot pedals, because Shady Nook School became Shady Nook General Baptist Church on Sundays, and Mrs. Wiley was in charge of the organ for services.

On Election Day, the school became a polling place. And during deer season, the school closed down entirely, priorities being what they are.

My mother was a teacher at the time, and when she took over at Mill Creek School several miles away, I went with her. It was there that the pie supper I remember best took place.

For this occasion, my mother imported some entertainment: two nieces -- sisters from Bismarck -- and a couple of their friends who fancied themselves to be the next Maguire sisters. I remember in particular they did "Mr. Sandman" that night, and it was a hit, even though Mill Creek School didn't even have a reed organ.

Every pie supper I've ever been to had a cakewalk as one of the featured attractions. It cost a nickel to walk around a circle outlined on the schoolhouse floor using chalk from the blackboard. There was music of some kind, and when the music stopped, several folks had to leave the circle. Eventually someone landed on the right spot and won a cake.

The main event, though, was auctioning off the boxes with their suppers concealed inside. There was an air of mystery -- and a good deal of tomfoolery -- involved. Presumably the purchasers of the boxed suppers weren't supposed to know whose food they were bidding on. Wives or girlfriends who somehow decorated their boxes to clue in hapless husbands or boyfriends often discovered -- too late -- that devious handlers had switched boxes in order to liven up the doings.

Probably the biggest thing that ever happened at a pie supper was that youngsters, who had to follow all the rules and toe the line as students, got to watch their parents and other adults squeeze into much-too-small desks and spend the evening cutting up and misbehaving a little, something they rarely did in real life.

And I'll say this about pie suppers: Some magnificent pies were sold there, and some fetched a right smart price. Every cook has a specialty -- fried chicken, cornbread, chicken and dumplings, burnt-sugar cake -- but great pies, with their made-from-scratch crusts full of lard and their tasty fillings, are the prize of farm kitchens everywhere.

Yep. There's something in the air that says it's pie-supper season.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.