Off to School

Eight Grades in a One-Room Schoolhouse

My school years were in a rural school. I think that it was all pretty much what you could expect because you had from first grade to eighth grade all in one room.

In a one-room schoolhouse, and the bad part of the school year was the winter time because the one-room schools had high ceilings. Maybe it had a 12 foot ceiling or something like that, and the heating systems they had were designed to discharge the heat six foot off from the floor, so you never got any heating on the floor. It was all in the ceiling.

We didn’t have any electricity so you couldn’t move the air around.

For some reason or another I was always blamed for any bad things that happened in the school. So my dad arranged to have me attend city school for my eighth grade and they still had bad things happening at the school.

One of our closest neighbors had a large family. I think they had nine children. The oldest girl in the family and I were the first two rural students from that district that ever finished high school.

Even though the times were bad back in the 30s I was able to get one year of education at The School of Engineering in Milwaukee; I’m an industrial engineer. So, what I did get out of that was a fair background in mathmatics. I worked shortly after – well, the year I was married was in the following year, I got a job working on survey crew, land surveying, and we tried to relocate some of the old land markings from the original government surveys.