Wednesday...Comment from Aunt Martha

Below is the complete, unedited Comment that Aunt Martha sent to me on my Yahoo mail account last night, as Blogger found it too large for the system.

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Charlie,

Enjoyed your History posting and your pictures from your recent Ottumwa visit.

Tried to post the following from my family history story but the blog wouldn't let me because it was too long. Some of it is from before your time. (I was always told it was 6 miles to town)

All is well here.

Schools


Attending parochial schools for our family involved some complicated logistics, at which our father was a master.

I had started kindergarten at St. Marys in 1942, so I finished the school year there after we moved to the farm in March of 1943. staying during the week with the Boblenz grandparents who lived on the North Side at that time, about half way between 402 and St. Marys.

The first year we lived on the farm, my sister Margaret and I attended St. Patricks Elementary School on the South Side.. At the end of the year approached, my parents knew that we wouldn't be able to buy gas or tires to drive the six miles to town to school, so they convinced the nuns to let me make my First Communion early. (I wouldn't be the required age seven until June.)

The next year Margaret and I attended the Horan Country School, a one room school about a mile from our house and close to the Horan grandparents. We rode to school with the teacher because she drove by our house on the way to school. . She was the one who told us about Roosevelt dying. (At that time we didn’t have electricity so had no radio to get the news.)

The Horan school was typical of what you see in movies about the pioneers attending school. There was no electricity; kerosene lamps were used. We had a water pail with a communal dipper. Heat was from a pot belly stove and there were boys and girls restrooms outside. There were less than twenty students for grades kindergarten through grade 8 and I was the only one in the second grade.

The folks weren’t very happy with the quality of education there, so the next year they found a way to get us to town to school at St. Patricks in spite of the gas rationing. Over the years our transportation to St. Pats varied.

We rode with the mail contractor who transported mail from Bloomfield to Ottumwa. We rode in the back of the panel truck with the mail. A Black girl about our age from Bloomfield was also a passenger and St Pat’s student.

Part of the time we rode with Grandpa Horan who lived at his place east of ours at that time. He was still on the Board of Supervisors. He had a Chevy coupe and listened to a soap opera on the radio and we were not supposed to tell that we also listened to One Man’s Family with him because Mother considered it inappropriate for young children.

We also rode with a St Patrick parishioner who lived south of us on highway 63. He worked at the Western Union office. His daughter worked at the public library and that may have been the connection for my job there in later years.
For a time we rode the Missouri Transit Bus for a grand total of 45 cents for Margaret, Phil and I. (Can’t remember how the costs of the other rides were taken care of.) We flagged down the bus and rode it to Vine Street across from the John Deere plant and then walked the rest of the way. (The only colder walk was on the Iowa State campus as you made the turn north at the Botany Building to get to the Home Ec building)

When I got old enough to get a school-driving permit, Daddy taught me to drive, bought the famous Packard funeral home limo that had been used for pallbearers. The seats in the middle folded up and we put the cream cans there and delivered the cream to the dairy, and ourselves to school. This didn’t last long because the farming operation changed when we began selling Grade A milk and it was picked up on the farm. One of his favorite stories was the time when he was teaching me to drive that we got stopped by the cops on the Ottumwa viaduct because I kept switching lanes.
One of the interesting things about St. Pat’s to me as an educator is that it was a laboratory school for the teacher education program at Ottumwa Heights College. I think the quality of the education was probably good. The nuns were selective about what was taught and discipline was tight. We did school plays, I remember being Lucy in one about Fatima. Don’t remember any PE or sports.

I believe that religious education is the only valid reason for sending children to a private school. That conclusion comes after 12 years of being educated in them and over forty years involvement in public schools. However, comparing today’s parochial and public schools with those of 40-50 years ago is like comparing apples and oranges; since they’ve both changed so much.
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