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| Bona School, 1927. The Frieze boys are not in this picture, although many of their cousins are |
Bona
School had a staff of three teachers—a principal who also taught the Big Room,
a Middle Room teacher, and a woman teacher for the little kids in the Little
Room. In 1933 the principal was Mr.
Hardesty, the Middle Room was taught by his wife, and a Miss Fern had the
Little Room. In 1934 they were replaced
by Mr. J. B. Mitchell as principal, George Richey (one of our distant cousins
who had taught us at Shady Grove) in the Middle Room, and George’s wife Evelyn in
the Little Room.
The
school yard was quite large, probably an acre, so the school building sat well
back from the dirt and gravel road. There
was a coal shed behind the schoolhouse and a well with a big cast-iron pump. On each side of the schoolhouse, and just a
bit down the hill, there were four-holer outhouses, one for boys and one for
girls. South of the building there were
teeter-totters and swings. In the far
corner of the schoolyear, down beyond where we played our brand of football,
shinny, or rounders baseball, there was a small stable for three or four horses
or ponies for those who rode to school. Not
many rode in my time. We all walked anywhere
from a mile to two and a half miles.
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| Huck Finn & Tom Sawyer |
The
old stable was used mostly at recess by the older boys who would sneak down
there to smoke a Bull Durham roll-your-own cigarette or maybe a tailor-made if anyone
had one.
Smoking,
of course, was strictly forbidden. One
time during noon hour, I saw Mr. Hardesty slip down there quietly. Sure enough, three or four boys had a smoke
going. The one who had it in his mouth
(I think it was Keith Carnes) tried to flip the butt back into his mouth to put
it out right quick but he gagged on it and coughed a gob of smoke right into
Mr. Hardesty’s face. The principal did
not say anything at first. He simply
slipped off his belt and proceeded to give Keith a good licking right there,
then he gave the others some very choice stern words.
Corporal
punishment was common in the schools then and was expected. Not only did the parents not object, evey kid
knew that if he got a whipping at school, he would get another one when he got
home. Some of the fathers did that on
general principles and other, I understand, would lay into the errant boy and
grow, “There, that is fer gettin’ caught!”
