Second Grade and the “Corn” Show

Each classroom through junior high, had a cloakroom or closet along the side or the back of the room. These had sliding doors I seem to recall. Probably the cloakroom had little use on early fall or late spring days, but in winter it was filled with overshoes, coats, caps, etc. Children living within the town walked to the school; bus service was provided only for rural children. And generally children in town went home for lunch.

The school day ran from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. with an hour off for lunch. Getting home for lunch and back to school by 1 p.n. was easy for us as we were only a couple of blocks from the school For my relative Harold Renquist who lived at the far east end of Gowrie it was a different matter but he always (I was given to understand) went home for lunch. Harold was enough older than I that I never remembered him in a school setting.

My friend Howard Nelson also resided on the east edge of Gowrie, but somehow or other he and his two cousins Beth and Faith Blomgren (who lived near him) were permitted to ride on the school bus. Perhaps they were just outside the city limits. In the first grade the cloakroom was along the north side of the room, in the second grade on the south side.

One of my recollections of the second grade was of the only time I recall of being kept after school for disciplinary reasons. It happened in connection with the annual “corn” show which was held in various rooms in the basement of the school building. While the show was in progress the rooms it occupied were off limits to the pupils during school hours — they had a guided tour of the exhibits, etc., and perhaps they could freely attend after school was out (I don’t remember specifically as to this).

One of the boys in my class, Dale Hauser, inveigled me into going to one of the exhibit areas during a noon hour; we were observed and Mrs. Woods kept the two of us after school and reprimanded us. It was a pretty mild reprimand, in retrospect, but I was quite frightened at the time. The exhibit that had lured me to disregard the attendance ban was a rather elaborate mechanical construction from an Erector set.

As I mentioned the “corn” show was an annual event. It included both agricultural displays and home-making projects. The agricultural exhibits included displays of ears of corn which farmers had submitted in the competition for the best corn. There were also chickens in coops and, I believe specimens of hay, oats, etc.

Who judged the agricultural exhibits I don’t know, perhaps the ag teacher in the high school did, or it might have been the county agent. Maybe the exhibits were judged as a class project by the ag class of the high school.

One year my mother entered a coat that she had made for me, in which she had used a discarded one from one of my aunts as raw material. She won a prize for her project and I seem to recall in one of the picture albums that I have there is a photo of me wearing that coat.

In addition to the sewing projects there were I think displays of canned goods, perhaps baked items also. The corn show was sort of an anachronism of times past and it didn’t survive after the first few years I was in school. In a way it was sort of a fair on a very local basis, less extensive than the county fair or of course the state fair.



Schematic of first floor of Gowrie school (not to scale)