The lunches that
the rural children brought with them (based on what my mother
furnished us) consisted of a couple of sandwiches, some kind of fruit
(generally an apple or banana) and some kind of cookie or other
“goodie.” Some children might also bring some kind of drink,
perhaps in a thermos, but we never did. Most of the time we lived on
the farm my father was working in the treasurer’s office in Fort
Dodge and my mother would prepare a lunch for him also. He of course
always took a thermos of coffee in his lunch.
Note: I date my liking for
peanut butter to the sandwiches my mother prepared for me during the
years I spent on the farm and either riding the school bus to Gowrie
or riding with my father to Fort Dodge and the junior college there.
I don’t know what my siblings had but I had, as I recollect, a
continuous exposure to peanut butter. No jam, jelly, lettuce,
pickles, but just butter (the cow kind) and peanut butter.
The school building
had a lunch room and kitchen facilities in the basement floor. I seem
to recall that at least some of the grades or students ate their
lunches in the classrooms but of this I’m rather uncertain. In any
event during spring and fall months boys would often eat their
lunches outside the building — perhaps next to the three or four
horseshoe courts at the rear of the building, perhaps engaging in a
game at the same time as lunching.
For a few years in
the late 1920s or early 1930s hot lunches were prepared in the
kitchen and served in the lunchroom but this was discontinued perhaps
because of the effect of the Depression. It was in the lunchroom that
such events as the Junior-Senior banquet was held; at that event the
mothers of the members of the Junior class prepared the meal for the
banquet.
It was on such an
evening when I was a junior that my mother and I returning after the
event was over noted various signs of a severe thunderstorm and small
tornado. About a mile west of the Peterson farm at the Constant Hade
farm a barn had been under construction with the rafters up but not
yet secured. My mother and I saw that they had all been blown down.
When we reached home we saw that the old playhouse (converted into a
chicken house) had been picked up by the wind, blown over some
electric wires and then upended in front of the hay door on the barn.
The same storm damaged the barn on my dad’s farm; it was repaired
but a later storm in the 1960s damaged it so much that it was torn
down.
The easy walk to
school for my sister Clarice and me almost could have resulted in
injury to us on one occasion. She and I had started out from the
little brown house on a rainy day and had progressed as far as Molly
and Albert Rosene’s house, when Molly called to us to come to the
house because it had started to rain so heavily. Shortly after we
stopped there was a bolt of lightning that struck one of the large
trees in the parking strip of the JET Johnson residence directly
south of the Rosenes. A large section of the bark of the tree was
stripped off and projected toward the house where it broke the glass
in a large front window — a distance of perhaps 30 or 40 feet. Had
Molly not called to Clarice and me to stop we could easily have been
between the tree and the Johnson house when the lightning struck. I
don’t remember the event myself, the description is a secondhand
account.
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