Blanche’s School Years

posted in: The Stories of Erie PA | 0

By Blanche Bowers, June 27, 2017 — When I was in school, we walked several miles to get there, and one time I remember it was snowing. We were out in farm country, in the Franklin area, and there were hitched up horses to a sleigh to go to our one room schoolhouse. We got there, and there was this one room. If you were a good kid you listened to what the students in the higher grade would talk about, so when you got to that grade, you had a little bit of an edge on what was going on, and you got a better grade.

Normally we had recess, and we went outside to play ball or tag whatever, then the bell rang and of course we went back in and the teacher would call on each of us. Then we had music, and a man came in the recess room and you had 15 minutes to be on the old-fashioned piano and that was our music lesson. And obviously, if you were talented, you got it, and if you were like I am, you did not. We had some fights with the other kids in the other grade, and tried to be better than they were with the music, and this did not go down too well with them. That is about what my first grade was like. All of the other grades had to be exposed to music.

I graduated high school and went to courses after to do with communications, office work and customer service. I got a job greeting people as they came into the office and if they needed something or someone else, I was the ‘gopher’.