No. 138 May, 2010
Harold Ratzburg was born at the start of the Great Depression and raised on a Dairy Farm in Wisconsin. He served four years in the US Air Force in the 50's and was stationed in Germany, where he met his wife Anneliese, who helped get him through College to become a Civil Engineer. After a time as a Highway Engineer and College Instructor, he wound up as a City Engineer of a small town in New Jersey. Twenty four years later he retired to become an old geezer telling old stories on his new fangled computer.
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Maple Valley School Days
by Harold Ratzburg
When I think back to the good old days of my far distant youth, when I attended that two room grade school, Maple Valley, (located kitty cornered across the intersection from Fred Krueger's Cheese Factory on Co Highway G in Dupont,) it always beings to mind the stuff that our folks sent us off to school with, as compared to the high tech stuff that kids nowadays haul around in their school packs on their way to the bus.
The stuff we carried was a lot simpler, but back then, it got the job done to help us with our educational upbringing. Lets take a look at it, one item at a time, and compare with today's equipment.
The pencil box----was maybe the most important thing, especially if you happened to get a brand new one that year to show off. The pencil box was made of cardboard, about nine inches long and six inches wide, and how deep it was depended on how many drawers were in it. If you got lucky and got the expensive box with two cardboard drawers, the box was about 2 1/4 inches deep. It came with a wooden ruler and a 180 degree protractor made of metal, not plastic. It held all of your pencils and a pen holder and the changeable nibs for the pen holder. (No ball point pens---- they came when I was about a junior in High School.) The top of the cardboard box folded over and closed with a button snap on the front. No Velcro back then either.
Pencils----Times were hard in the 1930's, so corners were cut and us kids frequently got "penny pencils" which of course cost one cent and were not really worth even that much. They came with a graphite center which seemed to contain grains of sand mixed with the graphite because they would write along real fine and then would suddenly scratch so much that you thought you would dig a hole in the paper. The tiny cone shaped eraser on the other end was not much help on correcting mistakes either. When finally you got up to where your folks bought you real "Ticonderoga" pencils with nice soft No. 2 lead and a decent eraser, you really appreciated the improvement.
Pen Point Holder----With no ball point pens yet available, we relied on plain old pen and ink to write with. (You had to wait till you were a little older to get a fountain pen with an ink bladder in it that you filled with a little lever on the side.) The ink was kept in a bottle and each one of our desks had a hole in the top to hold the ink well so it wouldn't tip over. You dipped the pen point in the ink and wrote with it until it ran dry and then you re-dipped it for a fresh supply. And, you best have an old cloth for cleaning the pen point or it would dry up and not start again when you wanted to write.
One incident about pen point holders that I remember----of which I am not too proud of now----goes like this: Dickie Krueger, who lived up the road from us Ratzburg's, seemed to have a little more money in the family, and they could afford nicer things for him. One of the things that he had was a really nice pen holder, really nicely shaped, and a beautiful blue color. I envied that pen holder. One afternoon while walking home from school with him, Dick dropped the pen holder in the grass beside the road right across the road from Gust Schultz's driveway, and I sneakily picked it up and put it inside the bib of my overalls and kept it without saying a word.
Now comes the moral of the story------So I had a nice pen holder that I really liked, but-----I couldn't take it to school and use it, ----I couldn't show my folks because they would want to know where it came from, etc, etc, etc. My guilt has followed me around, even to this day, and I kinda wish I had "fessed up" to Dick while he was still with us and could hear me, but I am fessing up now. The moral of the story of course is---even sneaky Kid crime does NOT pay and can bug you a little for a very long time.
Crayons----About every year, I would get a new box of Crayola Crayons, containing sixteen basic colors. That was the standard size, I don't think they even had boxes that held up to 48 or more crayons like they sell nowadays. If you laid them out flat in the pencil box, the pencil box could hold them all, especially if you had the two drawer size.
I read somewhere that the crayon manufacturing people had a hard time coming up with new names for all the new colors that they were creating, but I guess that is just part of progress these days.
Book Bag----Compared with the back packs of today, (that you see the kids in grade school, high school and college lug around,) our book bags were ancient creations. It was a simple, oil cloth, box shaped, container that would hold books and papers. There was no place for a cell phone, or a water bottle or a lap top computer. The book bag closed with a flap and a leather strap and buckle and would of course keep the books dry if you had to walk home in the rain. The strap was a skinny one, about one half an inch wide, and it was not conducive to a comfortable carry of a heavy load. Thank goodness I never had to haul many books home for homework assignments. The strap was long enough so that you could hang the book bag across the front of you desk, and if you lucky enough that nobody was in the desk behind you, you could hang it there where it was a lot handier to get at.
Lunch Pail---The lunch pail was standard, almost all of the kids carried the same kind, unless they brought lunch in a bag. It had a dome shaped top where the thermos bottle was stored when the cover was closed, and the square bottom part held the sandwiches and cookies and whatever else Ma included to keep us fed.
That standard early lunch pails (in black, like all of Henry Ford's early Model "T's") was much different from present day lunch pails which come in a multitude of colors and with pictures of comic book characters and movie stars. Today's lunch pails come in such a variety that they have created a whole new field of collectors that pay some pretty top dollars to get one of the most desirable ones in top condition. There are whole books written that describe them, show pictures of them and give approximate values. You need a good sized room to arrange and show off your collection if that is your thing. Collecting stuff like stamps, of course, takes up a lot less room,---- just a word to the wise.
So Folks, that about covers all of my thoughts about our grade school days equipment that we carried. If you think I might have overlooked anything, I would really like to hear from you. Swapping old stories is a lot of fun. And maybe Dan would even publish them in the Advertiser. How about that??
Post script--- to the "Pickin' up Stones" Story
I got to talking to another old Geezer the other day about stone, rock, and boulder size definitions, and he spelled it out rather neatly. He said----a stone is something you can pick up and throw, a rock is so big that you have to roll it, and a boulder is so big that you can't move it yourself. Kinda makes sense, don't it????
So a pebble is a stone????
copyright 2010, Harold L. Ratzburg
by Harold Ratzburg
When I think back to the good old days of my far distant youth, when I attended that two room grade school, Maple Valley, (located kitty cornered across the intersection from Fred Krueger's Cheese Factory on Co Highway G in Dupont,) it always beings to mind the stuff that our folks sent us off to school with, as compared to the high tech stuff that kids nowadays haul around in their school packs on their way to the bus.
The stuff we carried was a lot simpler, but back then, it got the job done to help us with our educational upbringing. Lets take a look at it, one item at a time, and compare with today's equipment.
The pencil box----was maybe the most important thing, especially if you happened to get a brand new one that year to show off. The pencil box was made of cardboard, about nine inches long and six inches wide, and how deep it was depended on how many drawers were in it. If you got lucky and got the expensive box with two cardboard drawers, the box was about 2 1/4 inches deep. It came with a wooden ruler and a 180 degree protractor made of metal, not plastic. It held all of your pencils and a pen holder and the changeable nibs for the pen holder. (No ball point pens---- they came when I was about a junior in High School.) The top of the cardboard box folded over and closed with a button snap on the front. No Velcro back then either.
Pencils----Times were hard in the 1930's, so corners were cut and us kids frequently got "penny pencils" which of course cost one cent and were not really worth even that much. They came with a graphite center which seemed to contain grains of sand mixed with the graphite because they would write along real fine and then would suddenly scratch so much that you thought you would dig a hole in the paper. The tiny cone shaped eraser on the other end was not much help on correcting mistakes either. When finally you got up to where your folks bought you real "Ticonderoga" pencils with nice soft No. 2 lead and a decent eraser, you really appreciated the improvement.
Pen Point Holder----With no ball point pens yet available, we relied on plain old pen and ink to write with. (You had to wait till you were a little older to get a fountain pen with an ink bladder in it that you filled with a little lever on the side.) The ink was kept in a bottle and each one of our desks had a hole in the top to hold the ink well so it wouldn't tip over. You dipped the pen point in the ink and wrote with it until it ran dry and then you re-dipped it for a fresh supply. And, you best have an old cloth for cleaning the pen point or it would dry up and not start again when you wanted to write.
One incident about pen point holders that I remember----of which I am not too proud of now----goes like this: Dickie Krueger, who lived up the road from us Ratzburg's, seemed to have a little more money in the family, and they could afford nicer things for him. One of the things that he had was a really nice pen holder, really nicely shaped, and a beautiful blue color. I envied that pen holder. One afternoon while walking home from school with him, Dick dropped the pen holder in the grass beside the road right across the road from Gust Schultz's driveway, and I sneakily picked it up and put it inside the bib of my overalls and kept it without saying a word.
Now comes the moral of the story------So I had a nice pen holder that I really liked, but-----I couldn't take it to school and use it, ----I couldn't show my folks because they would want to know where it came from, etc, etc, etc. My guilt has followed me around, even to this day, and I kinda wish I had "fessed up" to Dick while he was still with us and could hear me, but I am fessing up now. The moral of the story of course is---even sneaky Kid crime does NOT pay and can bug you a little for a very long time.
Crayons----About every year, I would get a new box of Crayola Crayons, containing sixteen basic colors. That was the standard size, I don't think they even had boxes that held up to 48 or more crayons like they sell nowadays. If you laid them out flat in the pencil box, the pencil box could hold them all, especially if you had the two drawer size.
I read somewhere that the crayon manufacturing people had a hard time coming up with new names for all the new colors that they were creating, but I guess that is just part of progress these days.
Book Bag----Compared with the back packs of today, (that you see the kids in grade school, high school and college lug around,) our book bags were ancient creations. It was a simple, oil cloth, box shaped, container that would hold books and papers. There was no place for a cell phone, or a water bottle or a lap top computer. The book bag closed with a flap and a leather strap and buckle and would of course keep the books dry if you had to walk home in the rain. The strap was a skinny one, about one half an inch wide, and it was not conducive to a comfortable carry of a heavy load. Thank goodness I never had to haul many books home for homework assignments. The strap was long enough so that you could hang the book bag across the front of you desk, and if you lucky enough that nobody was in the desk behind you, you could hang it there where it was a lot handier to get at.
Lunch Pail---The lunch pail was standard, almost all of the kids carried the same kind, unless they brought lunch in a bag. It had a dome shaped top where the thermos bottle was stored when the cover was closed, and the square bottom part held the sandwiches and cookies and whatever else Ma included to keep us fed.
That standard early lunch pails (in black, like all of Henry Ford's early Model "T's") was much different from present day lunch pails which come in a multitude of colors and with pictures of comic book characters and movie stars. Today's lunch pails come in such a variety that they have created a whole new field of collectors that pay some pretty top dollars to get one of the most desirable ones in top condition. There are whole books written that describe them, show pictures of them and give approximate values. You need a good sized room to arrange and show off your collection if that is your thing. Collecting stuff like stamps, of course, takes up a lot less room,---- just a word to the wise.
So Folks, that about covers all of my thoughts about our grade school days equipment that we carried. If you think I might have overlooked anything, I would really like to hear from you. Swapping old stories is a lot of fun. And maybe Dan would even publish them in the Advertiser. How about that??
Post script--- to the "Pickin' up Stones" Story
I got to talking to another old Geezer the other day about stone, rock, and boulder size definitions, and he spelled it out rather neatly. He said----a stone is something you can pick up and throw, a rock is so big that you have to roll it, and a boulder is so big that you can't move it yourself. Kinda makes sense, don't it????
So a pebble is a stone????
copyright 2010, Harold L. Ratzburg