Lunches and Walking to School

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.