Bona School part 5: Lesson of a School Play

An outfit similar to what might have been worn by the author for his school play

I never forgot one lesson that I learned at Bona School that stood me in good stead in later years when my career at Boeing got me involved in public speaking.  One of the school plays that we put on around 1933 or 1934 involved some skits that depicted going to school in an 1880s’ schoolroom.  I was to be dressed in a homespun shirt and old time short pants.

My mother found some authentic clothes for me to wear.  Pour neighbor Bertha Beck had a truck full of old clothes from the time when her father was a boy.  She loaned me a pair of short homespun pants, a pair of galluses, and an old-fashioned white shirt.  The skit called for my pants to have a big ragged hole in the seat.  Of course Bertha did not want her father’s pants ruined so my mother loosely pasted on a piece of white cloth.  In the light of those few gasoline lanterns she figured that the audience would not know the difference and it turned out that it worked great.

I do not recall the point of the whole skit but there were several of us in it.  When my turn came I stood up in my clodhopper shoes (I was wearing a pair of my father’s work shoes so they really looked clumsy) and faced the audience to recite a ditty.  As my grandmother once said, I could not carry a tune in a milk bucket so I sort of chanted:

“Nine o’clock spelling lesson just begun,

Johnnie throws a spitball—just fer fun,

Hits the teacher’s ear with an aw-ful splat—

She turns around and says, ‘Now who did that!’

“Jonnie’s told to stand up with his face to the wall,

He says ‘I dowanna’ and he tries to stall.

If’n I stood up there I’d take an aw-ful chance—

Cause I gotta big hole in the seat of my paints!”

During the punch line I turned my back to the audience, bent over so they could see the fake hole, and peered at them through my spread-apart legs.  I had sweaty palms the whole time but it turned into a very gratifying moment.  Everyone laughed, applauded, and there was even a whistle or two.  I could feel my somewhat oversize ears getting red from embarrassment as I stood and bowed stiffly as I had been instructed to do.  I left the stage with a very good feeling about getting up in front of people.  It gave me confidence that would stand me in good stead later on as a commencement speaker, lead in my high school paly in 1939, and—much later on—in public speaking literally all over the world.

My mother’s idea about the fake hole in the seat of my pants worked so well that, after the program, Bertha Beck came around a bit upset that we had ruined her daddy’s pants by tearing a hole in them.  She was quite relieved when I showed her that it was just a piece of an old handkerchief basted on.

The deep impression that little performance made on me is probably why, after all these years, I am able to recall every word of my little ditty.

Although short, this episode give me a lot to think about as my father's great-grandchildren have been in several plays.  What influence of that will we see down the road?

Bona School part 4: Intrigue at a Pie Supper

I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter that Bona School was sometimes used for social events and sometimes for a fund raising “pie supper.”  I suspect that it has been a good number of years since the last pie supper was held anywhere.

Woman placing her pie (maybe hers) with others for

A pie supper was actually an auction with the proceeds going to the school fund.  When one was scheduled, all the ladies and girls in the community would bake their favorite pie.  They would then put the pie in a box and decorate the box with fancy crepe paper, ribbons, and bows.  The idea was that when the pies were auctioned the bidder would not know whose pie it was or what kind it was.  After the auction was over, the successful bidders would sit down and eat the pie with whoever it turned out had baked it.

This auction winner looks like he wants to take a bite out of her!

Maintaining secrecy resulted in some spirited maneuvering.  The girls would often trade pie boxes before carrying them to the school or else would cover them with a newspaper or a grocery sack.  In turn us boys had a regular spy network to attempt to determine in advance which pie box belonged to whom.

The whole thing would get complicated since boys and young adult males wanted to bid on their girlfriends’ pie since they were going to eat with the baker.  Conversely, they did not want anyone else to know.  (I suspect that, in some cases, the girls simply told in advance but not usually as that would take all the fun out of it.)  A couple of years I had a pretty good crush on Betty King Lindley and wanted her pie.  She was best friends with my cousin Mary Catherine, and I figured they would carry each other’s boxes so I bid on the one Mary Catherine had carried in.  I was right.  I ate pie with Betty King.

Another time I decided that I wanted to buy the pie of cute little Betty Lou Long (she was pretty as a spotted pup) but she was two grades behind me in school and I did not want anyone to know that I was sort of sweet on a girl that young.  I got a peek at the box Betty Lou’s mother carried in and bought it.  Of course I pretended to be very surprised when it turned out to be Betty Lou’s pie.

As you might well imagine from my comment about his nature, Richard one time came up with a scheme to make a little money on the side at a pie supper.  Got him in trouble, too.  He was in cahoots with our first cousin James Lowell Tygart.  The two of them volunteered to direct traffic in the schoolyard where folks would park their Model T’s, wagon, or buggy as the case might be.  The idea was that they would get a peek at the boxes, figure out who was carrying whose pie, then they would sell that information for a dime to the fellow that wanted a particular pie.

It worked out pretty well at first.  By the time the auction had started they had collected maybe a dollar between them.  It was afterward that they got their comeuppance.  Jaycee Lindley, who had already graduated from Dadeville High and was full grown, wanted his sweetheart’s pie but she coyly would not tell him what the box looked like.  Jaycee paid Richard to tell him which box it was and old Dick solemnly assured him what it looked like.  Well, Jaycee bought the wrong box and wound up eating pie with the widow, Bertha Beck, who lived across the road from us south of Bona.

Jaycee was mad, of course, because he had wasted a dime on Richard’s information.  He was a good sport about eating with Bertha (she made great apple pie) but afterwards he cornered Richard out by the coal shed, demanded his dime back, and was going to beat the tar out of Richard.  I did not think that was quite a fair fight so, when I didn’t see James Lowell making any effort to help Richard, I sort of dived at Jaycee from behind and knocked his legs out from under him just as he was reaching for my brother.  Before Jaycee could get to his feet we had disappeared into the darkness.  Jaycee was pretty big and I was glad that he was not one to hold a grudge—he just laughed about it later.

Bona School part three: classroom distractions

Bona School 1928

When I get to thinking about Bona School (the old building has long since gone and present-day Bona kids go to the consolidated school in Dadeville) fifty-year-old memories come flooding back.  I will try not to bore you with miscellaneous details but will endeavor to stick to some interesting things.

Bona School had no big school bell on it.  The only bell was a small, hand-held brass bell.  One of the teachers would step out onto the front stoop and ring it five minutes before class time and you had better be in your seat right quick or you would have to stay an extra half hour after school—which meant having to think up an excuse for being late getting home for the evening chores without telling your parents that you had been kept after school.  When that happened to Richard, he would blandly announce at home that he had stayed after school to wash blackboards and dust chalk erasers—which could well be true because something like that was usually what the teachers would make the miscreant do.  (No, we never tattled on each other—that would not have been fair.)

Each room at the school had its own “library” which consisted simply of a bank of shelves along one wall.  There was an American flag in the corner and each morning we would stand and recited the Pledge of Allegiance.  I recall that in the Big Room at the front over Mr. Mitchell’s desk there was a large picture of Sir Launcelot and his horse.  The only other decoration was a portrait of George Washington.

The older boys had a nasty trick they would occasionally play in the wintertime when those old coal stoves were going.  Some of the boys carried their rifles while walking to school in case they saw a rabbit or a squirrel on the way home.  They usually had a few twenty-two shells in a pocket.  Every once in a while when one of them was sent out to fill the coal scuttle, a twenty-two shell would find its way into the coal.  It would sound like a firecracker going off when it got hot in the stove which, of course, was a bit of a distraction from lessons.

The twenty-two shells were not very dangerous because, when they went off, the lead bullet did not go anywhere and the little brass casings would simply ricochet around inside the cast iron stove.  The principal had to try to figure out who was responsible because it was not necessarily the one who went to get the coal—someone could have put them into the coal bin in advance.  Mr. Mitchell was pretty good at spotting the sly look that could give the perpetrator away.

The worst episode of that nature was one time when someone sneaked a four-ten gauge shotgun shell into the coal.  Boy, when that thing went off it was more like a hand grenade than a firecracker!  It did not break the stove itself but it blew the door open and the stove pipe came crashing down.  Of course it scattered black coal soot all over the room and everyone.  School had to be called off for the whole day while the mess was cleaned up.

I did not get very dirty in that one because my desk was right by one of the north windows.  When the stove blew I simply flipped up the window and bailed out closely followed by Rountree Lindley who was my seatmate.  Of course we were closely questioned by Mr. Mitchell because it made it appear that we were ready for it.  I convinced him, however, that the window was the way I always went out when we had a fire drill.  The culprit was not found because no one had carried a four-ten shotgun to school that day so Mitchell sent the girls home and made all the boys stay and help with the cleanup.  That ended the episodes of ammunition in the stove as, from then on, Mr. Mitchell would check all the pockets of all the boys who left guns in the cloakroom an confiscate all the ammunition until school let out in the afternoon. 

Another check the teachers had to make every morning in the wintertime was for skunk odor.  Several of the older boys had steel trap lines and might have skinned a skunk then not cleaned up too well.  Even when it was hard to smell when he came in from the cold, a boy smelling of skunk would really stink in there by that hot coal stove.  The result would be that he got sent home to have a bath and get clean clothes.

I recall one time that Mr. Mitchell tagged a distant cousin, Gene Asbell, for having skunk on him and sent him home.  Henry and Maude Asbell (they were the Asbells involved in the feud with the Tygarts) lived about three-quarters of a mile east of the school.  A few minutes after Gene was sent home, Maude came stalking up the road madder than an old wet hen.  She called Mr. Mitchell out into the cloak room in the hall and really laid into him, insisting that her boy did not smell like skunk.  (We all smelled it and he really did stink.)

Well, Mr. Mitchell patiently heard her out but finally had enough of her tirade.  He calmly said, “Missus Asbell, maybe you don’t smell the skunk on him because I do believe that you smell like skunk yourself!"

Of course that made Maude madder than ever.  She got so mad that she was red in the face and could not even speak.  She finally went off toward home sputtering and fuming to herself.  I do not recall how long it was before she was on speaking terms with Mitchell, but was quite a while.

I met Maud Asbell in 1970.  I do not disbelieve my father.

Bona School part 2: Smoking behind the stable

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.  

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!”

Bona School, part I

Chapter 6

Bona School

 

Con Frieze's drawing of Bona School as it appeared in 1936

By the time we moved to that little farm south of Bona, Richard and I had attended four or five different schools ranging from the large Faxon Elementary in Kansas City to the little grey-weathered one room school, Shady Grove, where we went from Doc Hunt’s place and where Rex started in the first grade.  We attended Bona School from the time we moved to the big yellow house, then the white house and, finally, the little three-room house all just south of Bona.

Bona School (also known as the Lindley School, I guess because the Lindley family had founded it) was one step beyond the common one-room country school room.  Bona School sat on top of a low hill one-mile north of Bona itself.  It was a three-room “Jobe School” (I do not know why), having grades one through ten so it was sort of a combination of elementary and junior high school.  I would reckon that in “olden days” most farm kids did not go to school beyond tenth grade.

Bona School was a white clapboard building built in the shape of a “T.”  Across the ront there were two rooms and added onto the back was a third smaller room.  We referred to the back room as the “Little Room” because that was where they had grades on through four.  The larger room on the north side of the front was the “Middle Room” with grades five through eight.  The other was the “Big Room” where there were the older children in grades nine and ten.

To me there was definite advantage in those country schools with several classes in one room and where each class went in turn to the front row of seats to recite.  Since I usually found the work in my own grade quite easy, I would often listen in on the lectures of the teacher to the more advanced classes and then the following year I was familiar with much of the work.  I would often take home school books to read and study on my own over a weekend just to find out things I wanted to know—science books and geography in particular because I wanted to know about the world and everything in it.  I did not care much for history and both mathematics and grammar seemed to come easy for me.

To get back to Bona School, each of the rooms had its own coal stove for heat in the winter.  All were connected to a central brick chimney.  The rooms had moveable wall dividers between them that could be removed for social events, school plays, and the like. [It seems to me that schools thought moveable walls were an innovation in the 1970s and ‘80s] The desks were mounted on boards instead of the floor so that they could all be rotated to face the little stage that was located at one side of the Middle Room.

The school did not have a carbide lighting system like the Bona Church.  When we first started there, evening events were still lighted by coal oil lamps and lanterns; however, about that time the principal, Mr. Hardesty, raised enough money through pie suppers, etc., that they could buy six Coleman gasoline lanterns which gave considerably better light. 

Wikipedia describes pie suppers as being an Ozark phenomenon to raise money for schools, but I know for sure that they happened in Oklahoma as well.  Young ladies made pies and fixed picnic baskets which were auctioned off to the highest bidder (usually a man) and they ate with them.  The money went to the school.  I remember my grandmother telling about them being common in her day.

A Wondrous Place to Grow UP

On a small farm, the barn is a source of both work and amusement for growing boys—mostly the former.  One of the best things about a barn is the hayloft.  Our cousins and we could while away hours at a time up there.  There was always some baled hay that we could use to build “secret” caves and the main part of the loft usually had lots of loose hay.

Up along the ridgepole of a barn there would be a trolley on a track that was used to bring in the loose hay in piles.  It was equipped with long ropes and made a perfect place to practice gymnastics.  A frequent competition involved climbing up the end wall of the barn then come swinging down on the hay-rope to drop and land in a pile of hay.  The idea was to see who could go the highest and swing the farthest.  I did not much care for the long drop but I was always bound and determined to climb just as high and swing just as far as Richard, James Lowell, and Claude Todd—all of whom were roughly two years older than me.  Somehow, I survived.

Con Frieze's hand drawn directions for making a whistle and a panther call.

While I was on the subject of the things we made for ourselves in lieu of store-bought toys, I should have mentioned the whistles that we used to make to signal each other in the woods.  One was a whistle that we could make from a small maple limb in the spring or early summer when the trees were full of sap and new growth.

A maple whistle is fairly easy—if you know how.  You select a green limb about three quarters of an inch in diameter and cut a straight section about six inches long.  One end was trimmed at a slant for a mouthpiece and a notch cut through the bark an inch from that end.  The bark was then loosened by gently tapping it all along and all around to bruise it but not crack it, then the bark could be slipped right off the wood in one tube.

You then cut away most of the wood from the notch to about half an inch from the other end.  When the damp bark is slipped back on you have a perfectly good one-not “flute,” the pitch being dependent on the length and diameter of the whistle.  I used to try to make a longer one so I could cut some finger holes to have different notes but it was next to impossible to get the bark off a longer one in one piece without cracking it.

Another good noisemaker we sometimes made was a “panther call” made from a short section of green elder.  Elder grows with a thin shell around pith in the middle.  Using a piece about three inches long and three-eighths of an inch in one end.

The last step is to very carefully taper the sidewalls just a little at the end opposite the remaining pith.  The two halves can then be placed together and held between the heels of cupped hands.  You then stick the thing into your mouth and blow.  Opening and closing your cupped fingers can produce an eerie, almost blood-curdling, quavering squall that can be heard for a mile or more.

There were no panthers or cougars in the Ozark hills in the thirties, but there had been in pioneer days.  One time two of the older school boys created quite a commotion in that part of Dade County for a couple of days using those “panther calls.”  They each made one, then in the evening went to an isolated area of thick underbrush down along the Little Sac River northwest of Bona that was called “the cane brakes.”  After dark they separated about half a mile apart and started calling back and forth with their gizmos.

It was a blood-curdling sound, indeed, in the dark of the night.  The story quickloly went around the next day that panthers had come back to the Ozark hills of Dade County.  Those who had heard it swore that it was a cougar and his mate calling back and forth.

Plans were made around Bona to get up an armed posse to hunt the panthers down before they started killing farm animals.  At that point the perpetrators decided to admit that it was all a hoax because one of them might have gotten himself shot if they tried it another night.

(No, neither Richard and I, nor our cousins were involved—although we might well have been had we thought of it first!)

So, you see, Hard Times notwithstanding, there was always plenty of things for us boys to do even though we lacked Little League, the Boy Scouts, soccer, movies, or television.  We never felt that we were underprivileged.  Those Ozark hills were, indeed, a beautiful and wondrous place for growing up.  All that was needed was a fishin’ line, squirrel rifle, a pocket knife honed sharp, and a good imagination.

At least one store-bought toy of my father's childhood survived.  He still had it when he passed away at age 80 in 2002 so it must have been important to him.  Trix, whom I always thought was Pluto from the Disney cartoons, is a WaKourva push button puppet collapsing dog.  I even found an identical one on the Internet which was good since other than the name Trix, there are no markings or manufacturer.  I discovered that WaKourva was a Swiss toy manufacturer which raises more questions than it answers about how Trix ended up in Bona, MO.  Once more I wish I'd asked my father more questions.

The Versitile Corncob

When we did not have our rubber band guns handy and wanted to have a war (Richard and I grew up fighting and often not just pretend) corncobs were a favorite weapon.  They were light enough to just sting and not do any real damage like a rock would.  We often had a two-man corncob fight or we could have a dandy war when some of our cousins came over.

We would choose up sides, gather a supply of corncobs in our pockets, scatter out, then go looking for the “enemy” around the barn.  There was not much in the way of rules.  I do not recall that we had any scoring system.  We usually just fought until we got tired of it and went off looking for something else to do.

Of course, leave it to old Dick to figure out a way to cheat.  He often would have a secret supply of corncobs soaking somewhere in a bucket of water.  A dry corncob is light and inaccurate to throw but a wet cob is heavy and throws more like a rock.  You sure knew it when you got belted with one of those!  Naturally we would yell that he was not playing fair and sometimes when he resorted to his “secret weapon” we would get mad and start throwing rocks or else just walk away.  It was usually the latter because throwing rocks could result in a cross-country chase and it was often too hot for that unless you were headed for the creek and a swim.

Those plentiful corncobs were useful for a lot of things.  They made pretty good handles for either a file or a wood rasp and they could be used for a stopper in a water keg or a coal oil can.  They also could be made into dandy corncob pipes.  Fairly recently shelled corncobs were the best for a pipe and I always preferred the red ones.  It seemed that the outer part of the red ones was a bit harder and more durable than the white one and would not burn through so quick.

To make a pipe, you first cut a section of cob about two inches long.  Then, using the small bald of a pocketknife, it was necessary to hollow out the pith from the inside down to within about a quarter of an inch of the bottom.  Again using the small knife blade, a hole for the pipestem was drilled through the cob just above the bottom.

The pipestem was made from a section of grapevine six or seven inches long.  We used a straight section between leaf joints.  The vine has a small pith right down the middle.  We used a straight piece of bailing wire to drill out the pith to make a hole through the vine/pipestem.  The baling wire was heated ret hot over a candle flame or over a sort of burner that could be made from an old baking powder can with a hole cut in the lid.  We would fill it with coal oil and use a strip of gunny sack for a wick.  It gave a hotter flame than a candle.

General MacArthur with his famous corncob pipe. He was born next door in Arkansas

Our parents knew that we made and carried around corncob pipes for fun, but of course, it was stricktly forbidden to put tobacco into one.  Once in a while we might sneak a pipefull of Dad’s Prince Albert but there were a variety of other things we could smoke in a corncob pipe.  We sometimes used coffee grounds but they were quite acrid and did not taste very good.  There were various coarse weed seeds, some of which was called “Indian tobacco” but they had a pretty sharp taste, too.  The best thing was dried cornsilks.  Those cornsilks made pretty fair cigarettes, too, when we got a hold of a packet of cigarette papers from a sack of Bull Durham.  The dry cornsilks rolled into neat cigarettes.  They burned kind of like a dynamite fuse but we could get three or four good puffs before they burned our fingers.

We had to be very careful about smoking anything.  I do believe that Mother had the most sensitive nose in the county.  If we had been down behind the barn smoking cornsilks or something else even way off in the woods, no matter how carefully we chewed on a sassafras root or a willow twig, it seemed that Mother could smell smoke on your straw hat or your clothes almost as far as she could see you.  Sometimes we could make the excuse that we had built a campfire out in the woods, but she could often identify the kind of smoke.

Getting caught smoking was one of the offenses that could result in a good licking.  Mother, however, never administered corporal punishment.  That was reserved for Dad when he came in from the fields.  Most offenses such as smoking cornsilks were good for three or four swings of Dad’s razor strop or his belt.  That was not too bad as the strop or belt were wide enough to just sting a little without making welts.  Our backsides were pretty tough anyway.

In the little I inherited (other than stories) from my father there were two pipes, one of them corncob.  When I went to take a picture of it I could not find it, but I will keep searching because I know I laid hands on it six months ago.