The School Janitor

An account of my school days in the Gowrie school must perforce include some mention of the custodial/janitorial staff. Nominally this consisted solely of Gunnar Sigurdson. Judging from his manner of speech I’d surmise he was an immigrant from Sweden, a relatively late immigrant as compared with most of the Swedish element of the population in and around Gowrie.

Actually the care of the school and grounds was more than one individual could handle and he was assisted by his wife and two young sons (both somewhat younger than me — sort of in the age range of Vivian and Vincent). Occasionally he would hire a helper, but such help was not continuous. While school was in session Gunnar’s duties consisted mainly of sweeping the floors (classrooms and hallways) at the end of the school day. He would sprinkle a brown sweeping compound around and then sweep the floor with his long-handled push broom, and I can still see his two sons participating in this cleaning chore.

During the winter months it was also Gunnar’s duty to stoke the furnace. The furnace and steam boiler were located at the far end of the gymnasium wing and during my early years at the school the heating medium was coal. I don’t think the mechanical stoker was used — Gunnar had to get up during the night hours to add fresh fuel. Sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s, natural gas lines were installed in Gowrie (I can remember watching the laying of the lines in the vicinity of the little brown house) and I believe that the furnace in the school building was switched from coal to gas.

In the summer months Gunnar would use the time in various school maintenance work — such as varnishing the desks used by all the students. In the grades one through six the desks were movable. The desk had a little drawer below the seat in which books, tablets, etc. could be stored. There may have also been a place below the desk top for this purpose. The desk could only be entered from the left side. On the desk top at the far right was a place for an inkwell which was never used. The tops had been revarnished a number of times but still bore various indentations — scratches both accidental and deliberate.

The desks in the junior and senior high assembly halls were not movable, could be entered from either side, and had the storage area for books etc. below the desk top. The seat could be folded up perhaps to make floor sweeping easier. In the classrooms for junior and senior high students the seats were movable of the style more typical of those I encountered in junior college and SUI classes.

Some of the minor janitorial duties were actually performed by the students — such as washing the blackboards to remove the chalk dust. This was done by students selected by the teacher, and my recollection is that it was sort of a desired activity by the students. It was done directly after school closed for the day. Generally pupils were expected to leave the school premises as soon as school was over unless there was some approved reason — such as washing the blackboards — that intervened.

The Layout of the School

Generally I have a rather good recollection of the room, hall, restroom and other layout of the three levels of the school building as shown in the accompanying sketches. But some of the details are certainly questionable, not that it makes much difference at this point.

During a relatively recent visit to the school in Gowrie (perhaps 1994) my brother Vincent had arranged for us siblings to tour the existing facility. The building had been enlarged and the interior rearranged in part but significant parts were still recognizable to me. The changes were certainly in part the result of the consolidation of schools that has occurred in post-WWII years. For example I believe that Gowrie now provides the high school for the Gowrie/Callender/Moorland schools (now renamed “Prairie Valley”) with the other two towns providing primary and junior high facilities.

The School Superintendent and the Teachers

About the time the Gowrie consolidated school was organized, or perhaps coincident with its formation, P.A. Leistra was hired as the school superintendent. A single man of middle age, he brought with him a considerable background in the field of education and he was responsible in large part for setting a standard of excellence in teaching and scholastic achievement that characterized the school during my 12 years there. It is true that he left sometime during my junior high years but the effect of his policies continued through my high school years.

His insistence on pupil performance may have been one of the reasons why he left. Some parts of the community felt I understand that his standard were too high and the animosity they generated may have influenced him to leave. But in retrospect I feel that it was my good fortune to have my early public-school education influenced so favorably by him.

The standards influenced by Mr. Leistra’s presence as superintendent were reflected in the quality of the reaching staff which he hired. Nominally the teachers were hired by the school board but I’m sure the applicants for any position were evaluated by Leistra and the final selection was approved by him.

The teachers for the grades 1 through 6 typically had a rather short tenure. Often they were graduated of the two-year teaching curriculum at Iowa State Teachers College and almost invariably in the 1920s were young women who left after a few years to be married. The school policy was generally to hire only single women for the primary grades, the feeling being that a family should have only a single earner. There were exceptions however. Mrs. Wood, the second-grade teacher, was married but I have the vague recollection that her husband was incapacitated in some way or degree. And Mrs. Rice, the first-grade teacher, was a long-standing institution when I was in the primary grades.

The junior high teachers tended to follow the same personnel pattern as for the primary grades, except they might have more schooling. And they might be older as was Mrs. Knapp (a widow) who was the junior high principal when I was in eighth grade. The high school teachers, particularly the coach and the science teacher, were married men, as was the English/Latin teacher I had (a woman). But the others tended to be single in status. Although Mr. Leistra was single, the superintendent who replaced him when I was in eighth grade and after that were married I believe. (Yes, Mr. Anderson.)

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.

School Buses and Discipline

The school buses that transported the rural children were rather a motley assortment of vehicles. The older buses were to all appearances sort of “home-made” contrivances with the bus part fabricated of wood and set on some sort of small truck chassis. These were relatively small and could perhaps carry at most a dozen or perhaps a dozen and a half children.

The seats ran along the sides of the bus and sometimes late-boarding children would have to stand. Entry as I recall was through a door at the rear of the bus. These older buses were painted black. There were several designs of newer buses, colored orange or yellow that were larger and more elegant in construction. Children riding these were envied by those consigned to the older buses.

After our family moved out to the Peterson farmstead during the Depression (between my 7th and 8th grade years in junior high) we of course rode the school bus morning and afternoon. The first few years we were on the farm we rated only one of the older buses.

One of the experiences indelibly etched on my memory is one of these older buses getting stuck in a snowdrift about a quarter of a mile or so west of the Peterson farm. The time was late morning — the school day had begun normally but a fast-moving blizzard had caused the school officials to send the buses out early to beat the storm. At least for the bus carrying us the storm moved in too fast. The bus driver at the time was Ernest Anderson who happened to be a brother of the Carl Anderson who at the time was renting the old Woodard place just adjoining the Peterson farm and west of it. Ernest left the bus leaving the children, walked to his brother Carl’s place and Carl drove out with a bobsled to carry us children the rest of the way home. I can recall huddling under some sort of tarp in the bobsled.

Later on we were favored by having one of the newer buses. By present-day standards the buses, particularly the older ones, would be considered grossly unsafe but during the years they were in sue there were no untoward occurrences. Contributing to the absence of incidents was the low speeds the buses operated at (probably they didn’t exceed 35 mph at their highest speed) and the light and slow traffic they encountered in the town of Gowrie and on the rural roads.

The bus driver, in addition to piloting the bus, was the disciplinarian in charge and the children riding were quite aware of it. The threat of being put off the bus to walk (as Mr. McCubbin, one of the drivers of the bus we used once threatened) was enough to quell any juvenile misconduct. In exercising discipline he was certainly confident of being backed up in his actions by the school superintendent and the school board.

During my school days in Gowrie there was no possibility that the school discipline would be challenged by pupils or for that matter by their parents. Indeed most parents exercised a stricter standard than anything imposed by the school authorities. I am reminded of an incident that I heard of secondhand. The senior class in the high school had over the years developed the tradition of a “skip day” late in their last year. Theoretically this was against school policy as an unexcused absence, but its occurrence each year was winked at by the school.

When two children of a local farmer (by name Warner Lanson, who resided a mile north and somewhat west of the Peterson homestead) found out in some way that two of his children (twins) were expecting to participate in this event, he informed the bow twin that he could very well spend the day hauling out manure and he told his wife that if she had trouble keeping the girl twin at work, the girl could join her brother in pitching manure.

Walking to School, and Back

I started first grade in the fall of 1926 when I was six years old. My older sister Clarice had preceded me two years earlier, but she was only about 5-1/2 years of age when she started. Generally children started first grade in the Gowrie school when their parents thought it appropriate — there weren’t the cut-ff rules as to age that usually apply now.

There was no kindergarten class for Clarice and me, nor I believe for my younger sister Vivian who was next in line of the Strand childen. (Vivian had since informed me that she had half-day kindergarten.) Vincent followed Vivian and for a few years there was a kindergarten and he was enrolled in it. He, like Clarice, started school at a relatively early age — he was about 4-1/2 years old when he entered kindergarten. I recall that because of his age he didn’t proceed too well in school and there was some desire on the part of the teacher to “hold him back” for a second year. I guess this was solved in discussion between the teacher and our mother, at any rate he went into the first grade the next year. After Vincent the kindergarten was apparently discontinued, perhaps because the Depression resulted in funding being tight in the county.

The Gowrie Consolidated school was organized sometime in the early 1920s and the red brick building which housed all twelve grades was built in 1923, or perhaps that was the first year it was used. Rural school districts, such as the schools that my father and mother attended for eight years, had the option of voting to enter the consolidated district. Some did, others didn’t. The farming area where the Peterson farm was located voted into the district. My uncle Reuben’s farm was in a township that opted to keep its one-room country schoolhouse and my three Strand cousins (all older than I) had their first eight grades in the Bliss schoolhouse, where their father and my father went to elementary school. I believe my dad taught country school there for a time.

Across the road from my uncle Reuben’s farm was my grandfather Strand’s farm and this area voted to join the Lanyon consolidated district. The Lanyon school was smaller than the Gowrie school, as were several of the other consolidated schools in Webster Country (all probably consolidated at about the same time). My Strand cousins, after finishing country school, had the option of attending Gowrie or Lanyon high school. They chose to go to Gowrie and the youngest, Clifford, was in high school when I was, though of course at a higher grade level.

Note: The Lanyon school after consolidation was considerably smaller than the Gowrie school. After the three small districts of Harcourt, Burnside and Lanyon underwent a further consolidation in the post-WWII era, the Lanyon school, a two-story brick edifice, was abandoned. Some farmer bought it and used it as a barn I believe, a sad end. The town of Lanyon also declined and whether it has totally or mostly disappeared (like Lena, the little stop on the M&StL railroad, not far from my uncle Reuben’s and my grandfather’s farms which now consists only of a few isolated residences). Burnside and Harcourt still exist as small county hamlets.

The Gowrie school was located about two blocks directly south of the “little brown house” which my parents had purchased when I was quite young. So it was an easy walk for us Strand children between home and school. Rather different than had been the case for my parents who faced a walk of a mile or more, each way, on every school day — as was the case for my Strand cousins.

For us we walked first past Nellie Scott’s on the right and Mel Rosene’s on the left, crossed the street, then proceeded in the next full block past the Gowrie city park on the left and Albert and Molly Rosene’s, JET [?] Johnson’s, the pink Stenholm house and Sig Anderson on the right, thence across the principal thoroughfare of the town of Gowrie (the so-called Market Street that ran due east and west) past one more house on the right before reaching the school grounds.

The school day started at 9 a.m. and ended at 4 p.m. with an hour off for lunch. For grades 1 through 6 there was a 15-minute recess period both morning and afternoon. Children living within the Gowrie city limits were generally required to go home for lunch, only those children arrived from rural areas on the various school buses stayed at the school and had their lunch on the school premises. This rule was not rigidly enforced particularly if the weather was inclement. I recall at least one occasion when my sister Clarice and I, observing what seemed to be the start of a cold snowy winter day convinced our mother that we should take a noonday lunch with us. That day we carried our lunch in a couple of little two-quart tin pails that had originally contained either molasses or dark-colored Karo syrup. As it turned out the day turned bright and sunny by noon so I felt a little foolish at having brought my lunch.

For us Strand children, living only a couple of blocks from school, it was rather easy for us to walk home, have lunch and return to school for the start of the afternoon school session at one o’clock. As always we were joined for lunch by my father who walked home at noon from the bank where he worked. For a relative of the family, Harold Renquist (a second cousin of my mother I believe — his grandmother was the “Auntie Callestrom” of my grandmother Peterson — it was a much longer walk at noon since he resided at the far east end of Gowrie, about a mile from the school building, which was near the west end of town But he made the walk home for lunch winter and summer.

My Education

[Today, I begin the transcription of my dad’s account of his education, from first grade on through his adult years. —LS]

I suppose that I can more or less logically divide my formal education into four chronological parts. The first part of course would be the twelve years I spent in the Gowrie Consolidated school, progressing first through the six elementary grades, then the two years in junior high and finishing up with four years of high school. The second section would be the two years I attended junior college in Fort Dodge, followed by the third at the University of Iowa where I spent two school years plus a summer vacation. The fourth is a less well defined period that comprised the years I worked for Shell in San Francisco or Emeryville, during which I took a number of evening classes at UCB [University of California at Berkeley] (all related to chemical engineering) and several company-sponsored classes, mostly on the premises of the Shell installation in Emeryville. An addendum to this fourth section might be the courses I’ve taken at the college here [Southern Oregon University], both for credit and audited only.

Thinking back at these four intervals my impression is that I enjoyed the two junior college years the most, perhaps because of the contacts I had during my attendance with congenial friends. Of the two years I spent at Fort Dodge Junior College the second year evokes the most favorable response in me. I had no immediate goal in mind and was simply using the opportunity to take some classes that might have some value later on should I end up in some four-year engineering curriculum. The first year at the junior college was essentially a full year of engineering credits, the second only very partly so.

Perhaps the second most enjoyable period was the second year at Iowa and the following summer session. Not only had the reaction to being away from the familiar home environment for the first extended time in my life passed, but I had a part-time job at the University power plant that made my financial picture rosier. But I should add that all my school years were generally happy ones with only occasional times of emotional discontent.

Note: Prior to the formation of the Gowrie Consolidated school district the school in Gowrie was housed in a brick, two-story building located on the south side of the main street in the town, about a block and a half east of the city park. In a way it was simply a smaller addition to the newer building that replaced it after the consolidation. It lacked I think a gymnasium. After its use for an educational purpose stopped the building was converted into apartments and known as the Beckwith apartments, after the main who did the conversion. I have a vague mental impression of the man. I don’t think I was ever in the building but I’m not totally sure of this — when I followed Harris Magnusson on his paper delivery route I may have entered the building with him.

My Aunt Laurine was born in 1904, so she would have been 12 or so when the family moved into the house in town in about 1916 or 1917 after my grandfather’s death. I suspect she might have had some of her school years, principally high school, in the old school building.