I went to South Ward School from First Grade until high school.  South Ward was built in the 1920s.  It was a solid building.  Sometime in about the middle 1960s someone decided the building was unsafe and needed to be torn down and a new school built.  Everyone walked to South Ward School and to home for lunch and back.  There was no cafeteria.  The new building was built on the southern outskirts of Coleman.  As a result, almost everyone is now bused.

An interesting thing happened when South Ward School was demolished.  This building which was so dilapidated it was unsafe, required months and tons of explosives to bring down.

In fact, I fell in love for the first time while in South Ward.  It was with Miss Scott, my first grade teacher.  Teachers in those days had to wear dresses, could not smoke or drink alcohol and certainly had to be careful where they were seen and who with.  Miss Scott roomed with a family three houses from the school.

Each grade had two classes.  Usually the students in the grade were divided alphabetically at about the L.  Thus, sometimes my wife, Maudine whose maiden name was LAWS,  would be in the same homeroom with me while at other times she would be in the other class.

Interestingly, in 8th grade everyone took Spanish.

Next to the east exit of South ward was a concrete wall.  In those days blackboards were black and teachers wrote on the blackboards with chalk sticks.  A fiber or felt erasure was used to erase from the boards.  We thought we were important when the teacher chose us to take the erasures out side and pound them on that concrete wall until all the accumulated chalk had been beaten out of the erasure. Of course we were covered with chalk dust when we were through.

Neither Maudine nor I were ever in 5th grade.  We both skipped it.

One of our teachers was Jesse Martin who everyone called Miss Jesse.  Miss Jesse was determined to teach we poor country kids culture.  Very often either as part of her classes or as we walked into her classroom we would hear such things as “Aida” or “Figaro” or some other opera on 78 rpm records played on a big manually wound up Victrola.  Victrolas were record players made by RCA.  The mascot of RCA was a dog named Nipper and the company slogan was “His Master’s Voice.”

Miss Jesse had a sewing thimble which was nothing more than a metal objected shaped like a finger.  It was hollow and slipped over a finger.  If she didn’t like the way you were acting or were not paying attention she would thump a forehead with the thimble on her finger.

Miss Jesse would turn her back to us and write on the blacboard.  Sometimes we would throw paper wads or pass notes while she was doing this.  Invariably, she would turn around and scold the paper wad thrower or note passer.  We thought she must have had eyes in the back of her head to be able to know who the offender was when her back was to us.  Much, much later we realized that she saw us in reflections on a picture of George Washington that hung over the blackboard.

Every day school would begin with the class reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.  This was in each grade.

There were two things taught then I believe are not taught today.  One of those is penmanship.  There were no ball point pens. we used a penstaff and a bottle of ink.  We were required to use a Spencerian Number 5 point for the penstaff and Script brand ink.  We would spend hours practicing circles and curlicues and other handwriting movements.

The other thing was diagramming sentences.  There is no better way to understand predicates, adverbs, adjectives and sentence structure.  In the early grades sentences to diagram were very simple, in the latter grades they were very complex.

When it came time for recess (one in the morning and one in the afternoon), we just went outside and found something ourselves to do.  There were no organized activities.  About 100 yards north of the school was a stream we called a branch.  A fellow student named Mark Griffis and I would race each other from the school door to the branch and back during recess.

Each May the classes would participate in a Maypole dance.  Each child would have a long streamer.  One end would be tied to the top of a pole.  The kids would then weave in and out with other kids around the pole.

Shortly after school started in September, the Principal would have the entire school out on the playground practicing marching.  This was because the entire student body would march in the annual Armistice Day parade.  That was on November 11 and now called Veteran’s Day.  The armistice ending World War I was signed at the 11th hour of the 11th month.  Too, at that time every year there was a minute of silence in the whole town to remember those who had died in the War.

In about the 3rd or 4th grade my class got on a train in Coleman and road it all the way to Santa Anna which was a whopping seven miles away.  The other class in my grade, which included Maudine, road the train to  Novice which was 10 or 11 miles in another direction.  Whichever place we went the parents drove there and brought us back to school.  That was really an experience for a little kid.