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Memories of the opening of school in the heartland
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Posted by editor Mon Sep 3, 2007 10:52:35 PDT
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0 responses 0 comments I'm stuck in a time warp when it comes to the beginning of the school year. When I was growing up in the cornbelt back in the 1930s and '40s, school let out near the end of May and picked up again the day after Labor Day. If you think that was to give us hoodlums a longer summer vacation you're wrong. It was done so that kids would be available to help on the farm during the relatively short growing season in that region.

These days it seems like our grandkids don't get much of a summer break. They're in class until the middle of June and head back again in August, well before Labor Day. The reason this is important to us is that we have made it a point to take the kids on summer trips in our motorhome. Today's short vacations haven't given us much window for long jaunts, such as across the continent. We have done this in the past but only through the tightest of scheduling.

The short-vacation dilemma is worse than ever now because we have only two grandchildren still in public school. The older four are now married or otherwise tied up in their own adult activities. The two younger ones always seem to be booked for summer activities of which we are not a part. I'm sure these are worthy activities but I can't help feeling that the younger ones are getting the short end by missing the kind of RV trips with Grandma and Grandpa that have become unforgettable memories for the older kids.

We didn't take major summer trips when I was a boy. Farm people were tied to their crops throughout the good weather, town dwellers had jobs and businesses to run while the sun was shining, money was tight, roads weren't great and recreational vehicles were still way off in the future. World War II rationing made long-distance travel even more difficult. But even before then, during the late 1930s, a 200-mile summer trip was noteworthy enough to get mentioned in the local weekly paper. In 1938 my dad took us back to Washington, D.C. for a reunion of his World War I outfit. I was a local celebrity for months afterward.

One unexpected result of having four to six weeks more vacation than kids get today was that we actually looked forward to the start of the new school year. In Iowa that was when “country kids” arrived to finish their education in town after eight years in one-room schools out in the sticks. Unless you were there you can't fully appreciate the impact of this infusion of ninth graders. After tolerating classmates going back to kindergarten, we suddenly had a fresh crop of pretty girls and handsome boys to freshen our social lives. The downside was that the country kids were usually superior scholastically, wiping out the rest of us on the grade curve until they got dumbed down to the level of the town kids.
Keep in mind that family farms were still the norm in that era, when the average farm size was much smaller than it is now. Through greater mechanization, farm consolidations and road improvements which make it possible for many farmers to live in town, the rural population throughout mid-America has since plunged, leading to the demise of country schools. Going into the ninth grade no longer offers delightful surprises.

I have been in California for so long that I'm not even sure when summer vacation starts and ends in Midwest schools these days. All I have are my memories of how it used to be and I'll take those over the current truth every time.

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