Getting ready to go back to school took little time in the 1940s, especially if you attended a one-room school.
The school provided nothing but books (many of them old), but pupils needed little equipment. The big purchase was a Big Chief tablet, a nice thick one with a black line drawing of a chief on the red cover. Add to this several yellow pencils with No. 2 lead and an eraser.
About fifth grade you also needed a fountain pen and a bottle of ink. Ballpoints came in later, and the old desks—most bearing carved initials of an earlier generation—had a hole for an inkwell. Even the oldest kids, the eighth graders, took considerable care in filling their pens, which weren’t used all that often. One bottle lasted all year, as I recall.
Some kids also brought a tin cup rather than use the one that belonged to the school, which had a well rather than running water. We pumped a fresh bucket of water in the morning before school and another at noon. We filled cups from the long handled metal dipper or, when the teacher wasn’t outside, from the pump.
Almost everyone had some new clothes, probably one new pair of jeans, two or three new blouses or shirts, a skirt or two, possibly a dress, and new shoes. Mothers, or the girls, made some of the clothing, part of it from feedsacks, part of it from cloth purchased in town.
The opening days of school were steamy, so some of us brought one other item, a cardboard hand fan distributed by a local funeral parlor.
Carolyn Mulford
