Rural Routes: Fruitland grade-school classmates gather to reminisce, catch up

Editor's Note: Rural Routes is an ongoing photo and feature series about the lives of everyday people in Southeast Missouri. It is scheduled to appear on Mondays in the Southeast Missourian.

On County Road 542 outside Pocahontas on Saturday, opposite a cornfield, three balloons and a homemade sign welcomed members of the “Class of 1978.”

It wasn’t a high school reunion — that would be later that evening in Jackson — but rather a meetup for a group of grade-school classmates from the rural areas north of town.

“We were the last class to attend the old Fruitland school and the first to attend what is now North Elementary,” explained Keith Fernandez, as the other classmates lunched and mingled in Red Barn Homestead, which Fernandez had rented for the occasion.

And while the Jackson Senior High School reunion is a larger affair, the former grade-schoolers say their smaller gatherings are often more meaningful.

Members of the Fruitland/Pocahontas grade school Class of 1978 look at a photo album during a class reunion Saturday at Red Barn Homestead near Pocahontas.TYLER GRAEF

“I hold no animus for the people we graduated [high school] with and there are some people I’ll be very happy to see again,” Fernandez said. “But we’re a much closer-knit group here than we are to the high school people.”

The class of ’78 reunions, held every five years or so, involve the usual reminiscing and looking-through of photo albums, but these classmates’ memories have a much more rural flavor. They recall how the schoolhouse was literally a three-room house with a basement, how the playground was a 5-acre field, and how when they arrived at North Elementary for fourth grade, the introduction of air-conditioning was a godsend.

Of course, they remember the paddlings, too.

“If you were a real troublemaker, which sometimes I would be, you’d get threatened by Mrs. Leimer, who was the principal at the time, to get a paddling with the electric paddle,” Fernandez explained.

Mrs. Leimer kept the electric paddle on a high shelf in her office where the children could see it, long and shining with a grip at one end. Nobody ever saw her use it, but the threat alone was enough to keep wayward pupils like Fernandez in line.

Members of the Fruitland/Pocahontas grade school Class of 1978 are seen during a class reunion Saturday at Red Barn Homestead near Pocahontas.TYLER GRAEF

“It turns out, all these years later, it was a 9-iron,” Fernandez said.

“None of our families golfed, so we didn’t know what it was,” Rodney Pensel added with a laugh.

Some of their fondest memories were of recesses, about how Mrs. Ludwig always played with them, helping them to design dream-home floorplans out of grass clippings, playing “bear” tag instead of freeze-tag, or about how Tammy Mueller was the only one who could ever boot the kickball over the Butler grain bin across the field for a homerun.

“And then us boys would have to go get the ball,” said David Smith. “And there were snakes out there.”

“Remember when Bobby Britzman went back behind that grain bin and came back and had that snake in his hand and it bit him?” Pensel said. “Scared me to death.”

“It just goes to show how rural we were,” Fernandez said. “There were working farms right there.”

But their relative seclusion, Pensel said, helped teach the kids how to get along with one another.

“Some lived way down by the river, some lived over here in the German community,” he said. “We all had very different backgrounds; it didn’t matter though.”

And the mere fact their grade-school reunions persist seems to prove that sentiment; about 15 of the 20 or so who went to the school attended this year’s gathering.

As the afternoon drew down, Fernandez produced a wine bottle filled with apple pie moonshine and the class of 1978 drank a toast.

“To the next five years,” Fernandez said.

“To the next five years,” they said.