Country Schools*

Poor things haven't seen a kid in years. They don't look as depressed as they are simply desolated, where they still exist at all. Sure, some people live in them these days, having turned them into homes; but most are long gone--the old one-room schools. Here one stands out in the country, empty of kids, empty of soul. 

I feel a little guilty snapping a picture, having caught the old place so out of sorts. It's like coming up on a dead body along the road. There's a face here somehow, or am I dreaming? It seems an act of mercy to take the color out. I don't know why, but black and white bestows at least some vagrant dignity. 

Once they were ubiquitous, hard as that it to believe. Here's the Carmel, Iowa, area, circa 1908. Ye olde Atlas claims six of these schools existed in what amounts to six square miles. Look for yourself.

Once they were greatly welcoming, I'm sure. Farms were much smaller; families were much bigger. Many more kids meant more rural schools. All six of these are long gone now, but then so are most of the kids.

My mother taught in one of these places long, long ago, mid-thirties or so, when she was a young thing just out of normal school, too young at times to handle big farm boys who walked through doors like this only occasionally, when they weren't cultivating or helping out with spring planting. I remember Mom telling me that some of the boys she had in Lakeview country school were almost her age and somewhat fearfully bigger than she was. She remembered letting one of them drive her car, some fellow named LeRoy Fritsch, long dead, I imagine. She used to shake her head in disbelief when she remembered letting him do that. I'm sure she was taken with him somehow. I've been a teacher myself.

And once upon a time, in a school just like Hoff District 80 my mother said she was having a good day, mid-winter, when in the middle of a lesson to one grade or another, something started rolling up the hardwood floor from the back, making the kind of hollow noise that edged itself into distraction. She didn't remember what she was teaching, but she remembered hearing the empty noise then seeing a marble, one of those big ones--didn't people used to call them "shooters"?--big as a chestnut.

Like I was saying, a place like this, just such a place.

She was busy with some of the others--a school like this included all eight grades--and I know she was deeply invested in whatever it was she was doing. People say she was a great teacher, and I believe it. Anyway, there she was, mid-winter, in the middle of school a half mile from Lake Michigan with a bunch of tough farm kids when a big marble came rolling up on the wooden floor. I've always thought it was LeRoy Fritsch who did it.

Without thinking, book in hand, she reached down and picked it up. It was, she said, so shockingly red hot that it seared her fingers because it had been heated on the potbelly stove. My mother rarely used bad language, but that moment could well have been one of those times when refraining was out of the question. 

Whatever she said or did at that moment, the pain and shock and disrespect never really left. Nor did it leave her son, who heard the story when he was just a little boy who loved his mom. 

I think I hated LeRoy Fritsch for most of my life, even though I never met him. Old childhood hate that keeps the name alive after all these years and both of their deaths.

You can't help thinking about it when you stand out there beside what few of these still exist--that once upon a time a place like this was full of stories, full of life.

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*  Rpt from March 6, 2015, when there were, I'm sure, more than a few of these abandoned schoolhouses in the country and neighborhood.