Some Observations

from the Hill By HH (Hub) Brown of OwegoThe other morning when I heard them announce on the radio that this would be the first day of school, it made me remember my first day, also. We lived on a farm in a neighborhood called German Hill. This was about seven miles from Tunkhannock if you followed the river to a little settlement called La Grange. That was the name of the Lehigh Valley station but the Post Office was called Osterhout. A few years ago, we stopped at a garage there and asked the attendant just where the little settlement that, when we were kids, used to have two stores, a grist mill powered by an overshot water wheel, a blacksmith shop, and a good-sized hotel, was. We told him that some seventy years ago that had been "going to town" for us. The railroad station and the hotel were gone, and he said he had never heard of La Grange.

You started in the first grade at five there and I'll never forget how our teacher looked. He was dressed in a neat suit, white shirt and tie but his left sleeve was finished and hung empty some four or fire inches above his pocket. There was some kind of a hand there out of sight. Some times we would see movements in that short sleeve, as though little fingers were moving there but none of us ever saw that hand. If the sleeve on that side wasn't shortened he tucked it into his pocket . He used this arm however, for if he wasn't carrying a slim book pressed against his side he had one of his switches there. He always kept a supply of these under the little front porch of the schoolhouse. I don't know if these were "hickory sticks" the old song mentions or not but I know they were seasoned and dry.

Some of the older kids told of something that had happened in a previous year. There was a small creek in a pasture across the road from the school house and in the spring, with the melting of the snow and the early rains, this got to be quite a stream with many small branches. The story went that one noon hour it was quite warm and the water was running freely and the bigger boys began jumping across the streams. If the smaller boys thought they couldn't make it across, two older boys would grab their hands and with a running start they would try it together. Of course there were some short landings and soon most of the boys were wet to their knees.

When the teacher called them in with the bell, he sorted them. If their shoes and pants were wet, they went in a separate group. Then he had these boys place two long recitation benches end to end and lined the wet boys up and started them walking around these benches. As each boy came by, he stood at the end and would give each boy a swift cut with his stick. A couple times around and he had the little boys bawling and the others braving it out. There was no lecture or sermon with this, he let the stick speak for itself.

I was scared to death of him and so always tried to not stir him up. One day, though, my oldest brother and I were sitting at a double desk and something in a book we were looking at, tickled us and we started snickering. Just then, a book was shoved between our heads and rattled back and forth vigorously.

The next year he had gone on to some other school and we had a girl teacher. Back then, a pupil that wanted to teach school only had to finish high school, go for a year to what they called training class, and they were a teacher. This was a trying time for a young girl for there was always a group of big farm boys who had already decided they had education enough but wanted to see what discomfort they could make for the new teacher. This phase never lasted long and they were soon back hunting gray squirrels, trapping skunks or muskrats, and helping with chores on the farm.