2ND HOME: LUCERNE, MISSOURI

It was at our 2nd home that I remember being a small child from 1942 when I was 2 1/2 years old thru March of 1947, when I was 7 years old and in 2nd grade. Here I rode my tri-cycle and red wagon, both in this picture. This house and farm were located on a hill and I would coast down the hill on the dirt road with the tongue of the wagon in one hand and using the other hand to grab the back wheel of the waggon to stop it.

At this farm I learned to fish in the stock pond, and at 5 years of age began milking "my own milk cow", which Dad bought just so I had my own "chores"! I don't have a picture of the cow but here I am fishing at the pond with the house and barn in the distance.

Remembering back to this time, it seems like it must have been in an earlier century. Well I guess it was. We had no electricity, no running water, and the toilet was an outhouse. I started school at 5 years of age at the Jones School. The school was 2 miles from the farm on dirt (or mud, or snowy) roads. Dad and Mom bought a Shetland pony for me to ride to school and the week before school started Dad built a horse stall for the pony in the horse shed at school to separate it from the larger horses the older students rode to school. But that pony was a pest. To start with he was about 10 or 15 years older than I was! And devious! If I ever dropped the reins while opening or shutting a gate, the pony would take off at a trot or run all the way to school, leaving me in the dust to walk the 2 miles.

Well once you got to school, it was much like the farm house,. It was a one room building with no electricity, no running water, an outhouse outside, a well to pump drinking water, and a pot bellied stove in one corner for a limited amount of heat. But the teaching system was the most interesting. There were 8 grades in the school totaling 12 students but with only one teacher who stayed in one of the homes of the students parents each year. Since teaching each of the subjects for each of 8 different grades was over the top impossible. The teacher arranged the students desks in 4 rows from front to rear. In each row were the students for 2 grades: 1st & 2nd, 3rd & 4th, 5th &6th, and 7th and 8th. The teacher passed along in front of each row eaching a different subject and assigning work, and then passed to the next row doing the same. And so went each day and the whole year. Somehow it worked and the students learned their basic subjects. We then went home from school and did our homework at the kitchen table by kerosene lamp at night.

Below is my fine school pony with my surplus army amunition pack to cary my lunch and books.