Old schools

I came across this school on my September 11 ride from Rochester to Little Turtle’s village on the east side of Columbia City, IN. It’s on the Fort Wayne Road — the old route from Rochester to Fort Wayne before Highway 14 took over that role.

It’s called the Prill School. The brickwork is almost identical to that on one pictured in the 1997 issue of Fulton County Images, a publication of the Fulton County Historical Society. That one was called the Ebenezer School. The Prill School is northeast of Rochester, the Ebenezer school was to the south.

Shirley Willard, the Fulton County Historian, wrote in that issue about the school consolidation battles of the 1950s, long after the Ebenezer School had been consolidated with others to form the Woodrow School, which she attended. She concludes this section (which is just a small part of the story she tells) with these paragraphs, which serve to give the flavor of the issue at the time:

The state inspector condemned Woodrow because of cracked toilets in the girls rest room so Bryce Burton put in new ones. Then they called for re-inspection as the other one was in error. The inspector was angry when he saw new toilets and said, “Someone’s making a fool of me.”

The consolidation issue was placed on the ballot twice and was voted down both times. But the Indiana State Legislature passed a law to give the trustee the power to close the schools even though the majority of the people voted against it. So trustee Henry Skidmore closed the three country schools in 1959. There was much bitterness over this forced consolidation. Some people did not speak to Skidmore or any of his brothers’ families for the next 10 years, even though not all of his relatives even favored consolidation!

That was interesting to me, because it was only a year or so later that the community where we lived in northeast Nebraska was involved in a similar consolidation battle. My parents were on the anti-consolidation side. In that case, the consolidators were defeated for the time being, but much bitterness remained. You could say it was one of the formative influences leading to The Spokesrider.

This is a photo dredged up from an old web site circa 1995. (I blogged about it here, too, at The Reticulator.) It was taken just before the start of my very first bicycle tour. My youngest son is in the photo, too, and he rode partway with me some of the days. Here I’m showing him where we used to play ball in the schoolyard. We lived in a house next to the church in the background, where my father was pastor.

The school I attended was a two-room, wooden frame building, constructed in 1884, which is older than the twin to the Prill School in the Fulton County photo. It was a leaky old building with no running water, but it was a good place to go to school. I’m not sure when the district was finally consolidated and the building was torn down. I imagine population decline forced the issue if nothing else did. Local high schools now have much smaller class sizes than they did back in the early 1960s.

Most of my classmates went to Creighton to high school, three miles away. But there were several issues that came out of the consolidation battles that prompted my parents to send me elsewhere, to the small town of Center to the north, with a very small high school of about 30 students. I sometimes say (for fun) that my parents were dissatisfied with the local school so sent me away to go to school with the Indians. Center High School was on the edge of the Santee Sioux reservation, and about one-third of the students were Indian, judging by the photos in my copy of the yearbook. But that really had nothing to do with my parents’ decision — it was just an irrelevant factor as far as they were concerned.

There is more that could be said about that, but instead I’ll now go off on another tangent, with some other pix and stories from the same old web site that the schoolyard photo came from.

Before starting that 1995 bike trip, we drove to Creighton to get lunch. Myra found there a tourist brochure about Creighton businesses, with a logo of an old, bearded gold prospector and his burro on the front of it. The prospector is trying to pull the burro along, but the animal has its feet planted and is going nowhere.

Before showing me what she had found, Myra labelled the two characters Judy and John. She knew I’d enjoy the coincidence.

It so happened that when living there, we had a burro named Judy. It also so happened that in 1959 Judy and I (and our cub scout pack) took part in a parade for Creighton’s 75th anniversary celebration. Michael Landon, who at the time was Little Joe on the TV series Bonanza, was grand marshall.

This photo was taken by my mother before the parade began.

I was dressed up in a felt hat and fake beard, looking as much like the old miner on the brochure as a 10-year-old could. Judy had a shovel and pick axe strapped to her back, much as is shown.

The brochure also happens to depict our relationship quite accurately. Judy’s ideas were usually the opposite of mine. I could never get her to cross the creek running through our pasture, even in August when it was dried up. Yet when nobody was looking, she was quite capable of crossing it on her own, usually managing to be the far side when I wanted to bridle her up to ride her.

Getting a bridle on Judy was one thing; climbing onto her back was another. One technique was to get her alongside a wooden gate, from the top of which I could scramble onto her back. But this required the animal’s cooperation, and cooperation went against her nature. So although we kids would feed her, brush her coat, and otherwise provide for her, Judy seldom provided us the use of her back in return.

In the parade, though, all went well–for about one block. Then Judy stepped on a manhole cover. The noise spooked her, and she broke formation and took off at a good, stiff trot. I hung on to the halter rope and tried to stop her, but could do no more than drag my feet and slow her down a bit. The tools that had been neatly lashed to her back came loose and slipped down to her belly where they banged against her legs and bothered her even more. We passed most of the parade, I think, before she turned onto a side street and eventually came to a stop. We never made it back, and I never did get to see Michael Landon.

This incident helped Dad decide that we kids were too small to benefit from an animal like that, and some time later he sold her. He used most of the proceeds to buy my first real bicycle, a single-speed Raleigh, for about $45. (Schwinns were considered more desirable, but they cost too much for us.) Even $45 was a lot for him to have spent on me.

One of the things I like about hot summer days on Indiana’s back roads is how they take me back to the days of riding that bike (or riding horseback — yet another story) on the gravel roads near Bazile Mills. That (and the endomorphins) make me feel young again.