By Jim Hagarty
2011
Yes, it’s true. I really am Jed Clampett in disguise, without the $25 million, of course.
I went to a one-room schoolhouse near a crossroads called Bornholm, population 50, the same school my father went to and the one my grandmother attended in the late 1800s. I started there in 1957 and left in 1964.
The school closed a few years later and has since been torn down. It was practically my whole world for a long time and I grew to love it despite its deficiencies, the chief one being the fact that it had no running water. Hence, no sinks with taps and no flush toilets. Instead, in the washrooms, a lovely toilet seat sat perched above a deep hole. One young lad, in a fit of anger, once threw a football down one of those holes. Caught and convicted, he was lowered down by the feet to retrieve the ball, which he did. Had the boys who carried out the punishment lost their grip and let him go, he would have no doubt died.
For a few years until an oil furnace was installed in a crawl space under the school, the building was heated by a big woodstove at the back. I loved the heat that came from that thing.
Fifteen minutes before each recess and lunch, someone would be chosen to take a steel pail out to the handpump over the well in the schoolyard and load it up with fresh water. It was quite an honour to be chosen to do that but you didn’t want the honour too often or you’d get a beating later from some jealous classmate for being the teacher’s pet.
In any case, the pail of water was brought back into the school and set on a shelf at the back by an exit door. The students all lined up and took turns taking a drink from a tin ladle submersed in the pail. Not the most sanitary perhaps but maybe it toughened us up. To this day, I am rarely sick.
Speaking of tough, I have a picture of my father taken in front of the school with his classmates and teacher in 1920 when he was eight years old. Most of the kids in the school wore no shoes or socks, though my Dad did. The school was located on a gravel road. Ouch. I don’t know why they had no shoes. Maybe it was a preference, maybe a necessity.
This summer, my son and I were touring a back road north of our hometown Stratford in Mennonite country when we saw some farm girls in their pioneer dresses and bonnets walking down a gravel road – barefoot. For those girls, who still attend a one-room school, times haven’t changed at all.
