Announcer: The following program is a PBS Wisconsin original production.

[soft piano music]

Jerry Apps: What’s interesting as I think back on the years that I spent in a country school is that they were much more than places where children learned academics. That was important. We learned our academics and we learned them well. But the country school children themselves formed what I would today call a learning community. We didn’t talk about it at the time. We worked together. Young and old working together. Those who learned well and those who learned less well working together. Teacher and parents working together. It was a group of people who all wanted this school to succeed.

The kids that graduated from these country schools almost all of them were farm kids and when they went back to the farm they knew what community meant because they had experienced it for eight years in the country school. And thus, they were the foundation for the development of what community really meant in the rural areas.

Beyond that connection, the country school was the center, social center, academic center for the entire community. And not only was it the social center where everybody went to the Christmas program and all the other events that went on at this school, but the school gave the community an identity. And when the schools closed, a little bit of that identity was lost. In fact, quite a bit of that identity was lost. And the idea of a community of learners working together as an example of what a larger community might be and how it would interact and how people would help each other and people would care for each other and people would know each other and know each other well. A little bit of that was lost, as well.

[school bell rings]

[music transition]

Announcer: Jerry Apps: One-Room School was funded in part by Ron and Colleen Weyers, Joel and Carol Gainer, Greg and Carol Griffin, Morgan’s Shoes, Wisconsin History Fund, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.

[school bell rings]

[chalk on blackboard]

Jerry Apps: I want to start in 1938 because in that year, I was a little four-year-old and I would stand out by the country road that went by our place and I’d wait for the kids to come that were on their way to school. And one young lad I remember well. His name was Mike Korleski, and he would stop and he would chat with me and I thought that was absolutely fantastic.

Add another year and I’m now, I’m just five years old. I have twin brothers and I think my mother was more than happy to get rid of me. And so now, I’m standing out by the road because this time I’m not waiting just to talk with the kids I will be walking with them. Unfortunately, I wasn’t one to ever comb my hair, I had more hair in those days. And my mother said, “If you’re going to go to school you gotta comb your hair.” So I combed my hair and I had a cap, pretty much like I’m wearing right now. And so I put on my cap, my hat, and I waited for Mike and there were other kids to come and I walked along with them to school.

I mean, it was a fantastic event because we had about a mile along the country road and we would listen to the birds and we look for a rabbit and all that sort of thing and then we got to the top of Miller’s Hill, which down at the bottom of the hill was the school. And what was common was for the teacher to ring the bell at 8:30 because we had to get to school by 9 o’clock.

And I have never forgotten that sound of the school bell that first day when I’m on my way to school. [school bell rings] Ding dong, ding dong. And it has a little valley there and you could hear it echoing down the valley, ding dong. I mean, I was Well, what could be better than to be able to go to school? And I would hear that school bell. And now Mike said, “Well, we better hustle on because we gotta get there before 9 o’clock.”

And we Finally, we got to the school, pulled open the big ol’ school door. Mike said, “Now here’s what you do. You go right in here now, I’ll introduce you to Ms. Piechowski.” That was our teacher. Old, old woman, 18 years old, just out of Normal School. [chuckles] But to me, she was an old woman. Black hair, beautiful young woman. And she says, “Hi, Jerry, so glad that you can be a part of this school.” “There’ll be one more kid in your class,” she said, “Norman Hudziak, he’s going to be in the class with you.”

The first thing that I noticed was the smell of the freshly oiled floor. I’ve never forgotten that smell because the school board would have done that in cleaning the school in preparation for the fall term. And now I meet some of the other kids. Clair Jenks is there. Clair is probably in fourth, fifth grade and Clair was well, he took it upon himself to initiate the first graders. I didn’t realize that at the time.

And I need to back up a little bit and say that at home if you wanted a drink of water, we didn’t have indoor plumbing, never had plumbing as long as I was home. If you wanted a drink of water, you went to the water pail that sat by the sink and there was a dipper and you took a drink of water. I was thirsty and I was looking for a water pail. There wasn’t any water pail. And Clair said, “Well, now, if you want a drink of water, here’s what you do.” And I saw this water cooler. I’d never seen such a thing as that, just a beautiful water cooler. I walked over there and I says, “How do you work that thing?” He said, “Ah, let me show you.” He said, “You see that little thing in the middle?”

Jerry Apps: I see that.

Jerry Apps: “Get your nose close as you can to that and I’ll push the button and you’ll see how it works.” And so I leaned over anticipating to get a drink of water and what I got was a shot of water in my nose. And I was sputtering away, and Ms. Piechowski didn’t see this. This was not something that was a good thing to do, obviously, but that was something that Clair Jenks did.

Now, I’m sitting in my little seat way in the front of the school. The early grades were in the front of the school. The older kids were in the back. Bigger seats, smaller seats in the front. And I’m looking around the school to see what I see. I was always curious. And up on the wall right in front of me, is a blackboard that stretches across the whole front end of the schoolroom. And on either side of that schoolroom was a picture of Lincoln and a picture of Washington and to the left were maps, if you pulled them down like a shade and there you would see the United States or you could see the world. It was wonderful.

Especially later, I learned if you pulled them down and let go real quick, it’d go [snapping] and it’d go whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, but you didn’t want the teacher around when you did that. And on the other side of the room was this huge clock. Ms. Piechowski pointed out to us that we want you to be quiet at times in this school and we want you to be so quiet that all you will hear is this old clock. Tick tock, tick tock.

In the back of the school is our library. Three, maybe four shelves of books. That was it, but it was wonderful. One of the first exercises that Ms. Piechowski did, as I think back to it, it was a stroke of genius. She was teaching us how to read, Norman and me. And she laid out on the floor a highway and she gave each of us a little car, never had a little car before. We’re to drive this car along this road and about every two, three inches there was the word, “and,” “the,” “but,” et cetera. And you’d get to that and she’d say, “Well, you can’t drive on until you know that word.”

Within, I don’t know, couple months I could read basic stuff, Dick and Jane. The little Dick and Jane books. See Jane run. See Dick do something. [laughs]

I was one of those weird kids, I think, as I got to know a lot of other kids. I loved school from the moment I walked through the door and I have never gotten over it. The idea of learning something new, to me, is still just absolutely fantastic. And each day in school, I was learning something new.

This is not a good thing that I’m about to tell now and if the teacher had caught me then I would have gotten into trouble. Today I would’ve been expelled. I was out in the pump house where we kept the wood for the wood stove. I’m picking up some kindling wood because the teacher said, “Now you all have these duties to do and as a first-grader, you can carry some kindling wood in for the stove.” And so I’m out in the woodshed and Clair Jenks comes along and he takes my cap off my head.

Now, I had one cap, it was my favorite cap and I don’t care who this kid is, he’s now got my cap, he stands there, [mock laughing] and I pick up a piece of kindling, I whop him over the head. He falls to his knees, tears coming down his face. I said don’t do that again. I thought he was going to tell the teacher what had happened. He didn’t. He didn’t and we became good friends after that. You don’t do that today. And I don’t advocate that sort of treatment for a bully. But at the time it seemed appropriate.

Coming home from school, we’d often talk about the day. “Well,” I said, “Clair Jenks needs help because he just pulled the dirtiest trick on me.” And my pa said, “Ya’ know, Clair’s like that.” [laughing] And that’s about all there was to it. I didn’t tell him that I whopped him over the head with a stick. My mother would not have appreciated me whopping anybody over the head with anything. But I solved the problem in my own way. Nobody messes with my hat.

[recess bell rings]

Jerry Apps: Arriving at school, I carried a lunch bucket, as all of us did. The lunch bucket I had was a lard pail, five-pound lard pail. My mother cleaned it out. When we’d arrive at school and let’s say this is August or September, the fall, put our lunch bucket on the shelf in the entryway to the school. And then, promptly at 9 o’clock, we would all assemble around the flagpole because we would lift the flag up the pole.

An eighth-grader had that duty and I need to take some time in a bit and talk about duties because there was a progression of duties. You started out in first grade with cleaning erasers, nobody remembers how you do that. You take two erasers and you pound ’em together, and big cloud of dust and you sneeze and you have all kinds of problems. And that was first graders’ job. And then, you graduated. By the time you were in second, third grade you had graduated to sweeping out the outhouses, quite a mid-management kind of proposition that you were required to do. And you felt pretty good about it because no longer did you have to suffer the dust of the erasers.

And then about fourth grade, third grade, you carried in wood and that’s another very important duty. The teacher had you believing that each one of those duties, as you progressed up the ladder, was more significant and important. And it was true and you carried in water in the same way. So we had all these duties. By the time you got to eighth grade your duty, highest level duty of all, you tried to work hard to get to that point was putting up the flag and taking it down in the afternoon.

And so we’re now all gathered around the flagpole, little eighth-grader, big smile on her face, runs the flag up the pole and we say the Pledge of Allegiance. We do that every morning. Now, if she had allowed the flag to touch the ground at any point in that whole experience back to erasers. [laughing]

We all file into the schoolroom. We’re quiet. We learned how to be quiet. Bring the first-graders up front and they would recite, was the word used, and we would work our way through all of the classes.

Want to say a word about the teachers because I gained a lot from these teachers. A different one every year; I don’t know why they came and went, except some of them got married. Early 1900s, we started what are called “Normal Schools,” two-year schools for instruction in country school teaching. So let’s say they graduated from high school when they were 17; well, they were 18, 19 when they were out there teaching.

The teachers tended to live with the farmers in the community. Sometimes they would go from farm to farm in the early days. In my experience, they tended to live with McKinley Jenks who lived less than a quarter-mile from the school. And she walked to school, of course. She didn’t have a car and walked through the woods from Mac Jenks’ place to the school. Arriving before the students, generally at 7:30, 8 o’clock. And the first thing she would have to do would be to start the fire in the stove.

The teachers were the janitors, interestingly enough. They enlisted the students to help with the janitorial work, of course, but they were responsible for starting the fire the first thing in the morning. And it was 35 below zero outside, my gosh, that school was just deathly cold. She’d get the fire going. Hoping by 9 o’clock it would be somewhat warm so that we could learn what needed to learned that day.

And she also was in charge of teaching us the games that we played outside. She generally umpired the softball games. So, now she’s the janitor and the recreation director and, of course, in charge of teaching all of us. If you fall down and skin your knee, she was the school nurse. Would find some tape and Mercurochrome, nobody knows what that is anymore but the teacher was the glue, the key that kept it all together. They were remarkable people.

Think about this: they had to know first-grade material, eighth-grade material. They led spelling bees. They introduced us to the literature, if we could call it that, on the bookshelves, taught us how to read, taught us how to do long division, then geography. We had, really, a pretty decent geography experience. We had history. We studied Wisconsin history.

One of the interesting things about my school, when I started some of the kids could barely speak English. Those from Polish families. English was their second language. They didn’t know that. The Norwegian kids, some of them came. They couldn’t speak hardly a word of English. They spoke Norwegian. The German kids, what do you do as a teacher? My gosh! You can’t understand the kid. They survived all that.

There was tremendous respect for the teacher. Whatever she said was law. Whether it was right or wrong, we did it. And why? Because if we disobeyed the teacher, generally speaking, before we got home our parents knew and we caught holy whatever for disobeying. That’s the connection the community provided in the support of the teacher.

Now it was not fear. You’d say, “Well, you were afraid of the teacher.” No, that was not it. We’re not afraid of the teacher. We were respectful of the teacher. And it was not a dour, everybody was sad, looking at their feet. No, at appropriate times, we hooted and laughed. And, of course, why wouldn’t we?

Just as today, some we call them slow learners. They just had difficulty learning, and there weren’t any special teachers to work with them. There was just one teacher. But if she was wise and they were, every one of them that I knew, she would assign this little guy or gal who was having trouble reading. Say I was in seventh grade, she’d say, “Jerry, would you spend a little time with Mabel.” And then I would sit down with Mabel and I would say, “Now read this line to me.” And she would stumble along, and I would say, “Now, this is how I would read it.” That really works.

Little Mabel, we played softball together. Probably every kid knew each other very well, knew their families, knew their dogs, horses, and the whole schmear. So little Mabel is learning how to read. Doing that, by the time I was in eighth grade, I said, “I think I want to be a teacher.” Never got over it; I taught for 37 years.

As much as we liked the schoolroom, to tell you the truth, we couldn’t wait to get out of the place, and so recess and lunchtime, we were outside. For my two brothers and me, my mother always packed our lunch. And it would usually be a jelly sandwich and maybe a cookie and something else. Some of the kids came to school with sandwiches with lard spread on a piece of bread. That was their lunch.

‘Cause one of the things we learned without realizing we were learning was that not everybody has similar circumstances. Some of us are a lot poorer than the others. None of us had much, but some of these kids had nothing. So what we would do, “Have one of my cookies,” “Have one of my cookies,” “Here’s a sandwich that I don’t need.” That was lunch.

Well, it’s part of the community I think is so important that we were learning about in school. Those who needed something, we should help them. You wouldn’t let a little kid sit off to the side and eat a lard sandwich when you’re chomping on a big ol’ jelly sandwich and homemade chocolate cookie. There were a couple families like that, they just had nothing. Those lessons not in books were so important in those country schools. I’ve never forgotten them.

[child singing “Away in a Manger”]

Jerry Apps: Our teacher would start us planning for the annual Christmas Program. And that program, for her, was one of the major challenges of the year because there were instances where if the program was not deemed a success and was not well-accepted by the community, she may not have her contract renewed and she knew that.

So she would select the pieces that we were to recite and the little plays that we were to do and we would begin practicing in the afternoon, say a half an hour in November, and by the time we got to December it was the whole afternoon. She was intent that we would know what we were doing but you worked your way up from a first grader saying maybe a couple of lines and welcoming people to by the time you were in eighth grade you had major roles, like Joseph. That was a major role if you’re in the nativity scene as Joseph.

We had a regular stage in our school. Right after Thanksgiving, as we were preparing for the program, the school board would bring the planks down, nail ’em onto sawhorses, and they were a couple feet off the floor and that was the stage and the brown curtains in front. You could pull the curtains open. That was a really big deal.

Our teacher had several interesting challenges because we were such a mixture of kids. One of the families that had moved into the community had an uncanny proficiency in cussing. They could swear better than anybody in the neighborhood. We were astounded, my brothers and I and the other kids of our age, at how eloquent these young kids were in their ability to cuss.

Now the teacher was having a problem with this particular child because he insisted on cussing in school and of course that was a big “no-no.” He didn’t know the difference because at home that’s what was common language. And so she saw the Christmas program as an opportunity to change this kid’s direction. He was maybe in fourth grade, black hair, skinny little guy and he would talk in a near whisper and she wanted him to say just this one sentence, “Jesus Christ was born on Christmas day.”

And he would stand up on the stage and he would say it in a near whisper and she would say, “You’ve gotta speak louder, George. People gotta hear you say that.” [imitating George’s whisper] “Jesus Christ was born on Christmas day.” You couldn’t hear past the third row what he was mumbling.

And so now on the night of the Christmas program when the schoolroom was filled with parents and cousins and aunts and uncles and bachelor farmers and the whole schmear, he’s on the stage with the nativity scene. And now with a booming voice that you could hear to the outside he said, “Jesus Kee-rist was born on Christmas day.” The entire schoolroom burst into laughter. The teacher was so embarrassed she was ready to crawl under her desk. It was one of those memorable moments that, well, no one ever forgot.

On another night, the teacher that particular year was proficient with piano, not all of them were. And we had a piano that sat up to the front of the schoolroom. An old upright piano. And mice had built a nest in the piano, unknown to any of us.

The Christmas program consisted of a series of recitations. We call them “saying our pieces.” Little things we memorized, there were little skits, foolish little skits that we participated in. And then, the nativity scene was the highlight with Joseph on the stage wearing his dad’s bathrobe and Mary standing next to him, clothed in a sheet with a bath towel on her head and the naked baby Jesus in a little pile of straw, a doll on the stage.

And the teacher announced to all of us, “This is a solemn moment. There will be no giggling. There will be no laughing. There will be no smiling. There will be nothing. You will sit quietly in reverence of what you’re going to see on the stage.”

And Joseph came out and Mary came out and they’re standing there and all is well. And we commenced to sing “Away in the Manger,” teacher at the piano. And then, the little mouse resting in the piano, he did not care for “Away in the Manger” or anything else and so he crawled out of the piano and he stuck his little head over the side. And those of us in the front row began to giggle, violating the rule that the teacher had set. And we noticed the back of her neck getting red.

And then the mouse crawled down the piano and crawled up onto the stage. And now the audience began to see the mouse. A mouse without any sense of reverence for the program that was taking place, a mouse who was not listening to “Away in the Manger,” that we were singing so wonderfully well.

And then the teacher stopped playing and she looked around and she too began to laugh and the whole audience was in just hooted in laughter and it was the funniest thing that ever happened and so, finally, teacher went back to the piano, Joseph and Mary resumed their places ’round the baby Jesus and we continued singing [singing] “Away in the Manger, No place for his head” with reverence and quiet, exactly as the teacher had suggested.

And then, after the Christmas program Santa Claus. There was always a Santa Claus. One of the teacher’s jobs was to select somebody in the community to be the Santa Claus. He would come into the schoolroom yelling, “Merry Christmas.” He would first run around the schoolhouse shaking bells. Oh, my gosh! “Santa has arrived!” the teacher would say, and us older kids would roll our eyes. And Santa would come in stomping his boots and run up to the teacher and give her a big kiss. Her face would get all red and everybody would clap and cheer. It was part of the deal.

And then there was a big sack that Santa carried on his back of presents and so the teacher had a present for each of the kids, some little thing. I mean it was a big deal. It was always the Friday night before Christmas. That’s when the program was held.

You hoped for some praise from your parents and praise for German folks was not all that forthcoming. It was the other way around. If you screwed up, you would hear about it no matter what you were doing. But if you did something really well, the best you could expect would be maybe a head shake, something like that. We just accepted that but individually you felt good.

We were actors of the first order and I say that not jokingly because that experience that we all had as shy little country kids who had very little in the way of connecting with other people, the opportunity to stand on the stage and sing, say your piece, be a part of a play, whatever it was, was something for me personally that I’ve never forgotten. How valuable it was to be able to say something in front of a group without keeling over, fainting, or having stage fright or whatever happens.

Every kid that went to a country school had an opportunity, eight opportunities, really, each year, to do something, if not a lot of things, in front of a live audience.

[old radio music]

WHA Radio Announcer: Hello, boys and girls. I can just remember way back last May when I said goodbye to all of you and hope that you were all going to have a grand time during the summer. Here we are back again and with all our old friends from last year, we have a lot of new friends in our radio class today.

Jerry Apps: Way back in 1939 when I was in first grade, I noticed as a little five-year-old that there was this radio on the teacher’s desk. It was a Philco radio and there were two batteries. The school had no electricity. Of course, nobody had electricity. We didn’t have electricity at home either. But at 9:30 in the morning, this radio became the center of the universe for all the kids in the school.

Let’s say it’s about 25 after 9 on a Monday morning and we are patiently waiting for the teacher, who is the only one who could touch the radio. No kid would dare go near the radio. She snaps on the radio. There’s a little static and then promptly at 9:30 and I’ve never forgotten this, this voice, this deep voice comes on the air, [speaking in deep dramatic tone] “This is WLBL of your state station in Auburndale, Wisconsin and today we are once more featuring Ranger Mac with his special program on nature.”

Oh, my gosh.

Ranger Mac: Hello boys and girls, we’re standing at the threshold of another year. Ranger Mac wishes that each day of the year ahead may bring you many and many fine joyous things. That no matter what else goes on in the world your days may be full of the joys that rightfully belong to the youth time of life.

Jerry Apps: And we all at the edge of our chairs are patiently listening for but a 15-minute program, that’s all the longer it was, but it would be on every week and Ranger Mac would tell us about things in nature that were new to us. I mean, we’re farm kids! I mean, we pretty much thought we knew what nature was all about. We walked to school and back. We walked with our dads when we were hunting and fishing. But Ranger Mac would help us see something in nature that we didn’t see.

He also encouraged us to put together a conservation corner, a nature corner in our school. And we had a sandbox and we would stuck little artificial trees in there and we would bring little toy animals from home and we would have our little nature center.

My most wonderful memories go back, when I was just a scrawny little kid, listening to the radio along with some 50,000 other little kids all over the state of Wisconsin, tied together by radio. Because we clearly were isolated. I mean, we were out there in the boonies, clearly. And through radio now, we were brought together with a topic that was fantastic: nature. My gosh, nature.

Now, cynically, it was a break in what we were regularly doing [laughing]. It was different, I mean, it really was different and the idea that we were a part of something much bigger.

[music transition]

WLBL Radio Announcer: The Wisconsin School of the Air presents Journeys in Music Land with Professor E.B. Gordon.

Professor Gordon: Good afternoon, boys and girls. You know, something very nice has happened to us here at the radio station today. What do you suppose? We have 50 children from the Carter School up at Markesan visiting us.

Jerry Apps: Well, Tuesday morning or Wednesday morning, I don’t know which day it was but we would have, again, [imitating deep voice] “WLBL Auburndale, Today we have an opportunity to once more participate with Pop Gordon and the program is Let’s Sing.”

Well, how preposterous to think about the fact that somebody in Madison, in a wee little studio with a pianist would play songs that we, in the little country schools all over Wisconsin, I think beyond, had the opportunity to sing along with him and can you imagine what it would have been like if you could have traveled from one school to another and hear, again, thousands of country kids, all singing the same song at the very same time.

I mean, when you think about that, it’s quite amazing ’cause we’re talking about the ’30s and the ’40s and the idea of social networks, nobody knew the language even at that time. So Professor Gordon did a wonderful thing. There were little song books that he would also send out. And then, once a year, he invited representatives from each country school to come to Madison, go to the Stock Pavilion and there would be several thousand kids sitting in the Stock Pavilion with a sawdust floor and Prof. Gordon is on the stage and he’s leading all of these kids in the songs that they had sung. And, of course, now they are together doing it.

And it was a poignant moment because now for the first time the teacher, Pop Gordon, would have the opportunity to see his students and the students would see their teacher in person.

James Schwalbach: And that brings us to our little fun period for today. But up first, let’s see if we have everything all ready. We want to have a large sheet of paper, just as large as you can get on your desk and then to work with: either crayons or watercolors. Since we have such a big sheet of paper, I want you to use every single bit of it. Make your drawing so big that you use up all of the space on the paper.

Jerry Apps: And then, James Schwalbach’s program was Let’s Draw. Now, this is almost absurd. How can you draw something when somebody’s telling you something on the radio for heaven’s sakes? He had a wonderful approach to doing this. We all were taught, “Never ever color outside of the lines.” “Oh,” the teacher would say, “Now here’s this thing to color but don’t go outside the line.” And Jim Schwalbach didn’t give a rip about lines.

Here’s an example of what he would do. [imitating with deep voice] He would say, “Now today, put your heads down on your desks. And just think about what I’m going to tell you now. Imagine that you are in an aeroplane,” and that’s how they pronounced it in those days “…And you are flying from Wisconsin all the way to Norway across the ocean and you’re arriving in a city called Bergen and you get off the plane and you find this mountain place and you hear music and the place is Edvard Greig’s place in Norway, the composer, the Norwegian composer.”

[music: “Morning Mood” from Peer Gynt Suite]

And at that moment, Jim Schwalbach puts on the Victrola, the 78 record, one of Edvard Greig’s pieces and the kids listen to this music and he says, “You’re going down to his studio. You’re going to meet Edvard Greig. You’re hearing his music.” I mean, we’re thinking, “Whoa, what is this all about?” And then he says, “Okay.” Turns off the music. “Lift up your heads. You’ve got a piece of paper in front of you now. Draw what you just heard.”

That is the most creative thing I ever heard anybody do. “Draw what you just heard.” How do you draw music? But we all did. It broke so many rules. I’m sure the teacher was rolling her eyes. “Don’t worry about any lines. Don’t worry about anything. But draw what you heard.” Oh, my gosh!

But Prof. Gordon and Schwalbach, they introduced us to the arts in a way that we didn’t even realize we were being introduced to the arts. And people criticize the country school for its lack of breadth in curriculum. And The School of the Air added a fantastic dimension to that breadth.

And people say, “Well, all you studied in the country school was reading, writing, and arithmetic.” We did study those, but we also studied geography and we studied science and we studied all kinds of things that went way beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic. And music, nature, and art were provided by WHA Radio. And I, today, am forever grateful that that happened.

[clock ticking]

Jerry Apps: What kid did not look forward to recess? In fact, we would sit there and about quarter after 10, you could see a bunch of little heads looking at that big Regulator clock [tick tock, tick tock] and wondering, “Oh, my gosh. It’s still 15 minutes.” [chuckles]

Recess was a big deal. I don’t think of a game that we didn’t all play together. One of our favorite games, we called it Anti-I-Over, where you have two teams, one on each side of a building, and the building was usually the pump house because the school was too tall. So the idea was you had a rubber ball and you threw it over the building in such a way that it had to bounce on the roof on the other side and if someone caught it, and they usually did, then they would run around to the other side and touch one of us with the ball or throw the ball at us and then that person joined the other side and that was Anti-I-Over. And that was just great, great fun.

We played a lot of other games, too. We played Kick the Can. That’s language you still use today kick the can down the road. Well, it was a game that we played and it was a kind of hide and seek thing. The person that was it would count off to 25 and everybody went and hid and then you went looking for them and if you were too far away looking for somebody another kid would come up and kick the can.

The teacher was by and large out there playing with us and showing us how to do these games from the time that we were little tikes. There were many. Drop the Handkerchief was another one. Run, Sheep, Run was another one. In the winter, we played Fox and Geese, and snowball fights, and all that kind of stuff.

However, once we got to March, softball took over. We did not play what we called hardball. And why? Because well, we couldn’t afford it, I guess, to have a baseball, but nobody had a glove. We didn’t know about gloves. You could catch a softball with your bare hands but a hardball that was another thing. So there wasn’t any baseball.

At any given year, we’d have probably a dozen maybe that were playing softball. And a six and six would work, but not very well. So that’s what we did Work Up. Work Up was one of those games where let’s say that you said, “Well, today’s my turn to be batter.” And as long as you were able to hit the ball and run around the bases, you stayed as the batter. As soon as you were out, then you moved on. So everybody moved around. If you were out in the outfield, left field, you move to center field. Then you’d be in right field. Then you moved to shortstop, and so on. So everybody got a chance to play every position and everybody got a chance to bat and pitch, and all the rest of it. It was a wonderful way to learn how to play every position.

If you’re in first grade and you want to play ball, you could play ball and somebody would show you how to do it. And they’d show you how to hold a bat, how to swing the bat. And you didn’t have to run all the way to first base. Halfway was good enough. And also you got as many strikes as it took to hit the ball.

Now, the ball diamond itself, first base you encountered a box elder tree that was about 15 feet tall, scrawny. Once you got to first base, which was quite an achievement ’cause it was a fair hike and it was uphill to get to first base. Now, to go to second base, you had to go further uphill. And second base was a black oak tree of some considerable size. And if you thought you were going to slide into second base like you maybe had read about in the paper someplace, well you’re not going to slide into second base without killing yourself.

So you would hustle toward second base and then quietly come up to it and hold on to it because you were off base, not when you stepped off base, but when you were no longer holding on to the tree, that was a little special rule that we had. Now once you got to second base the idea was that you ought to have it a little bit easier the rest of the way around the bases.

So third base was a white oak tree and it was right against the pump house and that was downhill now, and the distance wasn’t as great. And then, third base, home was even further downhill, as it should be. If you can get to third base, you oughtn’t have to run uphill. You can run back downhill.

And if you knew how to hit the ball, and some of us did, you’d hit it so that it would only fly about 8, 10 feet high because otherwise it would end up in one of these trees and if you hit it about 10 feet high it might get over the fence, out on the road. And that was a home run and that was a really big deal. We played on that diamond all spring on up through May.

And we played with the neighbor schools on occasion. And our teacher, Faith Jenks, at the time, was a friend of the teacher at the Dopp School, which was the other side of Wild Rose. And the Dopp School had never been here before, to this place, to this Chain O’ Lake School. They had never seen our ballpark oh, “park” is the wrong word, our ball diamond.

And so they came over here in the teacher’s car. And the teacher got out and she took one look and said, “We cannot play on this ball diamond. We cannot play in the woods.” And Faith Jenks just sort of rolled her eyes and didn’t say anything. She said finally, “Do you want to play ball or not?”

I forgot to point out that the Dopp team came the catcher came with a great big mitt. I mean, the thing was as big as a watermelon. My gosh, the first baseman also had a glove and that was part of the discussion because Faith said, “We cannot play with a team that has gloves. We don’t have gloves.” And, of course, the Dopp teacher said, “We don’t play in the woods.” So, the compromise was: playing in the woods; the gloves stayed.

So, Jim Kolka is the pitcher. I’m on first base. Dave Kolka is on second base. My brother Donald is out in the outfield. My brother Darrel is out in the outfield. Mildred Swendryznski, maybe she was catching. She’s a good player. And the first player they put up to the plate was this enormous kid. I mean, the kid must have been five and a half feet tall, maybe taller than that. I bet the kid weighed 150 pounds. He’s a big kid, great big ol’ farm kid.

He grabbed up the bat, we only had one bat, he grabbed up the bat like it was a piece of kindling wood and I could see, standing on first base, there was poor Jim and he’s beginning to perspire, I can see that and I say, “Jim, throw your screwball.” And Jim winds up and he pitches his screwball. And it went right over the plate. And this enormous player, he whacks this ball. I mean he hit it as hard as he could.

And one of the advantages of Jim’s screwball is almost always the ball shot straight up in the air. It did not go straight ahead like it should. It shot straight up in the air and it ended up in second base. Remember, second base is the black oak tree. It’s way up in second base. And the big husky guy runs all the way around because the tree, the ball is stuck up in the tree. And we’re all standing there as a great quiet came over the game.

Dave Kolka had been in this circumstance before. And he stood under the tree, looking up. And all of a sudden there was a little sound and the ball comes drifting down and he catches it. And our teacher, Faith, says, “Out!” And the Dopp teacher is just furious. And our teacher reminds her, “I forgot to tell ‘ya, but that’s the rule of the tree.”

Well, the game continued the rest of the afternoon and we ended up smoking ’em, something like 10 to five ’cause they couldn’t figure out how to play ball in the woods.

[school bell rings]

Jerry Apps: We are on the grounds of the old Chain O’ Lake School that I attended from 1939 to 1947. And it was in 1947 that I was in eighth grade and I had polio in January of that year and I was out of school for a couple of months. My eighth-grade teacher at the time brought lessons out to the farm so I could keep up. I was going to stay with the rest of the eighth graders, but I was the only one in eighth grade at the time. But she did a wonderful thing in bringing the lessons out every day because all eighth-graders throughout Waushara County had to take an eighth-grade examination before they were allowed to graduate and thus be admitted to high school.

And so I was worried sick about taking these examinations because had what I’d been studying at home been enough for me to pass tests in every subject that was offered at the school? And so, the day came when I with, I don’t know, there must have been a couple hundred other eighth graders from around the county gathered at the Wautoma Normal School.

The test began in the morning at 9 o’clock. At noon, we had an hour off and I had a little sack lunch with me that my mother had prepared. And we were forbidden to talk with each other during lunch because we couldn’t share what we were doing. That would be cheating. So we all sat there quietly, eating our lunches, and then it’s back to taking tests again. And we did that until 4 o’clock in the afternoon.

I’m exhausted and my dad comes to pick me up. And he’s not too happy because he’s wasted a day planting corn and I still didn’t know if I’d passed. And a few days later, in the mail, came a copy of the test results. Yes, I passed. [chuckles] There’s nobody happier than my folks that I had passed. My gosh, my kid made it because I really wasn’t in very good shape to take those exams.

So, we were ready then for the after school, end of the school year picnic, which is right here on this very grounds where we’re sitting. All of the families who had kids in school all came. It was potluck. Everybody brought something to eat. And so, we had this great big meal and we had ice cream afterwards. And then, the teacher gave a little speech. And she said, “I want to thank all of you parents for all of the help you did in helping your children during the year.” And then she said, “Jerry Apps has passed the eighth-grade examination and he is now eligible to go to high school.”

I’ve talked with a lot of former teachers at country schools. And as difficult it was to be a teacher at a place like this, every one of those teachers said, “Those were some of my very best years as teachers.” They knew that they were making a major contribution to this community. And you could tell, with a big smile on the face at the end of the year that they had succeeded in doing that.

And after we finished the big meal, all of the fathers and this was a tradition that went back as far as the school was in existence I suspect. The fathers all played softball with the kids and it’s just great fun. And one of the things, as I reflect on that, it’s one of the few times I’d ever seen my dad play anything. Farmers didn’t take time to play in those days, except at this school picnic, which was wonderful.

Then a couple weeks later, at the courthouse in Wautoma, where criminals were charged, we all sat. [chuckles] 200, I guess, of us, who were going to graduate? ‘Cause that’s where the graduation was to take place. And Arthur Dietz was the Superintendent of Schools. And he gave a little speech on how wonderful it was that we had all successfully passed eighth grade.

Tell the truth, it was a big deal because there were a lot of people in my generation and certainly in my folks’ generation who had never graduated from eighth grade. So, this was a big deal to graduate from eighth grade. And we all then walked across and in front of where the judge would sit and Arthur Dietz gave us each a diploma, which had my name on it! Wasn’t just a blank sheet of paper. It had my name on it. I have it hanging on my wall today. It’s a huge thing. Twice as large as the certificate I got from graduating from the University. Twice as large.

Then, after the graduation, went home. And my dad went into the bedroom and he came out with a little present, something all wrapped up and he said, “I want you to have this.” And I unwrapped it and it was a Little Ben pocket watch, a one dollar pocket watch from my dad, the first watch I had ever had, gold colored. I wish I had it today. It was the most wonderful thing that you could ever imagine. It symbolized the fact that my dad had not graduated from eighth grade and now I had.

And for him, that was very important because of his generation most of them wanted their children to do better than they had done. And this was a symbol of that. It’s one of those things where you almost break down and cry because I really wasn’t expecting much of anything.

[soft piano music]

But as I look back at the whole experience, it was a wonderful education. I have no complaints whatsoever. I learned how to read, I learned how to write, I learned how to sing over the air, I learned some in-depth information about nature, I learned something about art, and maybe above all, I learned how to get along with little kids and big kids, and Polish kids and Norwegian kids and German kids, and some who couldn’t hardly speak English.

We all got along with each other fantastically. We had our little miffs, but by and large, I found that one of the most interesting experiences as I look back now from my other further education, how much I was learning that was not in the books. The idea of working together, of helping each other, of sharing with each other, of paying attention to the teacher and respecting her, but realizing that she can’t do it all.

I learned how I think most of the kids, we learned how to learn by ourselves and that’s an invaluable lesson. And I have a picture of the kids all lined up in front of this very school on the steps. And three of the kids have Ph.D. degrees. I don’t know of any of them that didn’t do well in whatever profession or job they sought.

And above all, we formed a community of kids, working together with the teacher, with the parents, as a kind of a microcosm of the larger community. There’s no better place to learn what community is than attending a one-room country school for several years as I did.

I was at the meeting when they closed our school in 1955. I was in college then. And there was a researcher who came out and he said, “With a consolidated school, your kids will be able to learn and participate in physical education just not available out here.” And there was an old guy in the back and he held up his hand and he said, “Let me tell you what my kids do on a typical day. They’re up in the morning at 5:30. They’re out in the barn helping me milk the cows, throw down hay, throw down silage, carry in straw, feed the chickens, bring in water from the pump. After a big breakfast, they change clothes and they walk a mile and a half to school. And in the afternoon the same thing. They walk a mile and a half back. And they’re out in the barn, throwing down hay, milking the cows, feeding the calves. I don’t think they need physical education.”

[chuckles]

[rhythmic guitar music]

Announcer: Jerry Apps: One-Room School was funded in part by Ron and Colleen Weyers, Joel and Carol Gainer, Greg and Carol Griffin, Morgan’s Shoes, Wisconsin History Fund, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.