Those Were the Days

School Reunions Most Important When Memories Fade

By Dave Rasdal of the Cedar Rapids Gazette

You remember starting the day by saying the Pledge of Allegiance. You remember the teacher having a switch or wooden paddle handy if discipline was necessary. And you remember the pair of outhouses in back.

Country schools, most notably the one-room schools that dotted the Iowa landscape as recently as a half-century ago, were places where getting to and from school was half the fun, where education was often one-on-one, where the lessons were more than readin’, ‘ritin’, and ’rithmetic.

It’s as Beverly J. (Sida) Poduska of rural Solon writes: “The legacy of education in country schools reminds many of us how we learned to care, share, and respect our family, friends, and others around us.

In 1959, when Beverly began kindergarten, she was the third generation in her family to attend Newport No. 3, which is still located along Highway 1 between Solon and Iowa City. {It is no longer there.}

 She remembers wearing new school clothes and seeing long rows of coat hooks, lunch pails lining a shelf, {and} wooden desks of all sizes. The school had no running water or electricity. And Newport No. 3 was fairly unusual because it had a basement that could be used for class projects and even recess in bad weather.

“There was a potluck picnic at the end of the school year, and all family members and friends in the community would attend,” Beverly writes.

Newport No. 3 closed after the 1962-63 school year, relegated to the archives in the minds of the students.

A month ago, I asked readers to share their memories of one-room schoolhouses. I’d run across an old one-room school near Atkins, west of Cedar Rapids, that is almost certainly destined for change since a new house is being built on the same property. While the building hasn’t been a school since 1936 and was subsequently used to store hay and farm equipment, just it’s presence along the road all these decades evokes memories. Several recalled that school, Center School No. 5 with fondness.

The memories of country school are as numerous as the students who recited their ABCs in one. But my space is limited, so I can relate only some of the many comments I received.

Lighting the oil burner on Sunday nights was always the chore of Don Wullner, now of Cedar Rapids, writes his sister Marlene Wright also of Cedar Rapids. (She includes their sister, Gerri Jacobsen of Cedar Rapids, in her letter. The three attended Center School.