It's all so far in the past now (more than sixty years), it's hard to be sure my "facts" haven't turned to fiction.
My one room schoolhouse stood in a small field that bordered the Newtown - Bethel road (Connecticut 202) at the Bridgeport turn off. It's long gone now. It was four or five miles from our house; too far for me to walk. So mother took me, my books and lunch-pail, back and forth each day in our 1936 Ford.
The 36 Ford… my gosh. Let me digress for a moment to mention the cars.
My parents bought the Ford second-hand in 1938, and drove it – out of necessity - until shortly after the end of World War II. It was a good car. We also owned a Packard, a huge funereal sort of vehicle with red wheels and a flat roof that hung out over the windshield like the brim of a cap. It's taken me some time to place that Packard historically. It seems my parents, in the fall of 1942, decided they needed a second car so Pop could go to the railroad station in winter without mother having to take him. It was hard for her; her health wasn’t good. Pop worked in New York. The Packard proved too big and thirsty, though, to meet the rigors of rationing, so they didn't keep it for long. But the Ford, as I said, outlasted the war, and mother continued to shuttle us both until we could find a replacement for the Packard. A brand new surplus army Jeep, as it turned out. Brand new, for a $150. My father sold the Ford for scrap during the fall of 46 for a lot more than that.
Pop never got drafted; he was too old.
The schoolhouse was an anachronism, the last one-roomer operating in Newtown and that only by default. It had been closed and shuttered for several years in the wake of consolidation, a repository for old desks and blackboards, but the war had forced it out of retirement. I'm not sure why. It seems to me there would have been fewer students, with everyone off to war, and lots of empty classrooms; or maybe the town's teachers, predominately female, had all enlisted in the WACS or WAVES and there weren’t enough teachers around to educate us. Or maybe the school buses had all gone to war. Anyway, the Dodgingtown schoolhouse (Dodgingtown being a suburb of Newtown), was reopened and repainted a pasty yellow, the only paint available, I heard.
It was a typical one-roomer; three windows per side, each with peeling green shutters (un-repainted), plus two more windows in the back, to the right and left of a tall brick chimney. In front, a heavy entrance door, framed by wrought iron railings, stood monolithically (from my young point of view at least) atop three cement steps. Directly above the door on the peak of the roof, a small turret protected a bell that was used to call us in from recess or to announce the occasional fire and air-raid drills. The teacher, Mrs. Brennan, who hadn’t enlisted, obviously, kept a smaller wood-handled version on her desk that she'd ring vigorously whenever she needed to get our attention, which definitely tended to wander as each day wound down.
The outhouses, in my opinion, were disgusting, but we all had to use them at one time or another, even Mrs. Brennan, though I personally thought she was far too beautiful and pristine to have bodily functions like the rest of us.
The tall chimney I mentioned earlier serviced the pot bellied stove that kept us alive in the cold months. There were basically two seasons inside the schoolhouse, the hot dry desert season of winter and the tropically sweltering season of early fall/late spring. Every spring the windows were swollen shut and impossible to open. That's when the sweltering season began. It was still too cold out side to give up the stove.
In the winter, one of the "older" boys would, on a regular basis, tend the fire, while one of the "younger" boys (I was often awarded the task) went to "the shed" to replenish the bucket with chunks of coal. The little girls didn't seem to do much, but giggle and whisper. If the fire were slow to ignite in the morning we'd start the day in overcoats, boots and gloves. It was that or freeze to death. Most of us sniffled our way from December to March. Mrs. Brennan wasn't immune. She would also cough and sneeze, but I don't recall her missing a class (I can't say the same for the rest of us). She was a wonderfully patient woman considering what she faced each day. But nothing was easy then. There was a war after all.
There were twenty to thirty of us in grades three to seven, depending on the year, all seated at old wooden desks that had inkwells and flip-up tops. Stains from the ink of the years before had saturated the surfaces. It filled the grooves and pits, the symbols and names that earlier students had carved. Wads of gum-stuck-to-gum, gum gone rigid, gum stalactites, hung from beneath the desks and the chairs on which we sat. The space inside, beneath the folding tops, was where we stored our books, lunches, pencils, papers and crayons and where, when we felt gutsy, we'd sneak a look at a comic or two, Captain America or Superman. It allowed us; in that secret place behind those open desktops, to consider, if just for a moment, the fate of mankind, with very little personal risk.
We learned a lot too. We learned to tell the good guys from the bad; and we learned it, for the most part, from all-star comic-book superheroes like Dr. Fate and The Black Hood.
When the war was over the authorities split us up by grades and sent us to Sandy Hook, a consolidated school. They closed the one-roomer again, as quickly as they'd opened it. Mrs. Brennan didn't join us at Sandy Hook; she stayed home to take care of her husband who'd been wounded in Germany. I don't think she had any kids. Mother no longer drove me to school. I went back and forth on a brand new school bus. Slim Dickinson, the driver, let me work the switch that opened and closed the doors. Pneumatically! I sat right behind him in the first seat so I could reach the switch without disturbing him. I felt pretty important. I worked those doors for over a year.
I had dibs, of course. No one could challenge that.
