March 2007                                                    The Megaphone                                                      Page 5

Washington Grade School

by Jane Ann (Seright) Lemen

When I grew up in Elwood in the '40s and '50s, there were six grade schools counting St. Joseph's. The public school system had one junior high school (grades 7-8) and one high school. St. Joe's also had a junior high and offered the first two years of high school.

Of the public grade schools, Central was the largest with two classes per each grade level. Central was unique in that it had no playground. When I was in sixth grade, Central didn't seem too bothered by the lack of a playground -- Central won the City title in basketball, baseball, and track!

I went to Washington on the northwest side at the corner of North 7th and North A. I suspect the building was similar to Edgewood, Osborn, and Linwood. All were brick buildings with an arched entry way with stone edging around the archway. They definitely were not handicapped accessible with several steps up to the front door and then more steps inside.

Washington School ~ 1907

There were eight classrooms, four on each floor with a large area between them. Perhaps once or twice a year we would have an all-school convocation in that large area between the rooms, so it was far more than a "hallway." I also remember how pretty the wood was in the staircase which was rather a grand affair, probably four or five people wide. Or so it seems to my memory -- perhaps it looked so big because I was so small back then.

Actually I started my schooling at Central downtown. That was in the '46 - '47 school year, right after the war, and was the first year the Elwood public schools had offered a kindergarten class. I can't remember if there was an afternoon class, but I went in the morning. My brother was a senior that year, and my mother, who seldom called upon him for "babysitting" with his kid sister, asked if he could walk me to school, and she would get me at noon. Can you imagine asking a high school senior to take his 5-year-old sister to school with him each morning? But Vic did so. I wonder -- do you suppose having your baby sister with you might be a "chick magnet"?

Our kindergarten teacher's name, I think, was Mrs. Wershing. I could be wrong, but I think I'm close. The only thing I really remember about kindergarten, besides the sand table, was the election of 1946. It wasn't a presidential election, just the Congress, but we held our own little election in our room. We were to vote by putting either a "D" for Democrat or a "R" for Republican on our ballot. Now my folks were ardent Democrats at the time, but I thought the "D" looked rather mundane, so I proudly made an "R" -- a much prettier letter. I'm not so sure but that reasoning is probably as sound as some others in voting.

First grade I was at Washington. When I started in the fall of 1947, Washington was only using four of its eight rooms, the four rooms on the east side of the building. Costs for education had been curtailed greatly for the war effort, and it was much cheaper to heat only four rooms. And it was also cheaper to heat two rooms on the first floor and the two rooms directly above those two rooms since heat naturally rises. 

That year, the six grades were divided among the four rooms by splitting the second grade and the fifth grade. The first grade teacher, Ada Evans, had half of the second grade as well as all the first grade. The other half of the second grade was in with the third grade, I think with Mrs. Hennegan. Can you imagine teachers having to do that today? And, in addition to teaching both first grade and second grade, Miss Evans was the principal! Whatever she was paid, which probably wasn't all that much, she deserved every bit of it! One of the things I remember about first grade was when we were to bring hard-boiled eggs to color for Easter, one girl brought a raw egg instead. Of course it got broken. The miracle is she got it to school in the first place.

The next year Miss Nolan was our teacher, and the second grade was all together, not split. They had opened one of the downstairs rooms for third grade. Mrs. Hennegan was our third grade teacher. After third grade, we got to go to the rooms upstairs. 

We had Miss Garwood for fourth grade, and again, half of the fifth grade class was in our room. After the warm and loving Mrs. Hennegan, Miss Garwood seemed very strict and stern. She ran a very "tight ship." I was sure she became a teacher because she hated children and this way she had the greatest opportunity to inflict pain and suffering on them. That's surely not true, but she was very strict, and we were all glad when we went on to fifth grade -- only to discover she was our teacher again! Oh no! Not Miss Garwood for two straight years! What had we done!

Then finally we came to sixth grade and Mr. Eherenman. For some reason, possibly because we were such a small class, ours was never split between two teachers. We started the year with all sixth-grade in our room. We were glad to get Mr. Eherenman for our teacher (I'll write more about him next month), but a young, and quite good-looking, teacher, Mr. Bollinger, had been hired for the fifth grade. And worst of all -- the fifth graders all reminded us that they would NEVER have Miss Garwood! NOT FAIR!!

Ah, but God is good. At mid-year, Mr. Bollinger was moved to the high school, and half of the fifth grade did wind up with Miss Garwood. The other half was put in with us. Those fifth-graders who were put in Miss Garwood's room had to eat their words. And the fifth-graders in our room hadn't bragged much anyway so we forgave them.

Recess was a special time back then. The playground would probably be condemned as unsafe today, but what fun we had on it. We had swings, teeter totters, a slide and monkey bar, and one piece of equipment that probably was dangerous, the Maypole. It was fun to swing around on the Maypole, but every once in awhile someone would show off by swinging the wrong way, and often someone, usually one of the smaller children, would get a bloody nose. I don't remember anything more serious than that.

The PTA was responsible for our nice playground. They paved one area for a basketball court, and put in a baseball diamond with a backstop. No bleachers, no dug outs, no baselines, certainly no concessions. I can't remember if we had actual bases or not. But we had a lot of fun playing baseball or softball. We also played dodge ball in North A Street in front of the school. And I can't remember cars being a problem. I think most people would see we were out playing at recess and simply go another way.

One of the great privileges of grade school was getting to clean the erasers for your class. Usually two kids at a time would take all the chalk erasers back of the building and pound them to get the chalk dust out. We weren't supposed to pound them on the building, but occasionally we did it anyway. And oddly enough, we always got caught -- perhaps the white dust on the red bricks gave us away.

Another great privilege of reaching sixth grade, in addition to having Mr. Eherenman as teacher, was getting to go down the fire escape during fire drills. I've seen schools with fire chutes on the side, and that always looked scary. But the fire escape didn't and it showed how grown up we sixth-graders were, that we got to use them.
  

The basement of Washington held the furnace room, the restrooms, and an empty room that we used for recess during inclement weather. The restrooms had a row of stalls but only the last stall had a door on it. And that stall was for teachers only. Not too much privacy, but we had none of the shenanigans that go on in restrooms today.

Another memory of grade school that I truly cherish is walking to school. Actually in my case, I preferred to run to school. There were no school buses pulled up in front of Washington at the end of the day. I think perhaps the country kids who rode the buses all went to Central. We also had no cafeteria and went home for lunch. Those whose mothers worked went to a neighbor or friend's house for lunch, someone who had agreed to watch the children for their mother. We did get a "snack" mid-morning -- graham crackers and milk. I hated it. I loved milk at home when it was cold from the refrigerator and came in a glass bottle. But I didn't like it from a carton and especially when it was warm from sitting in the hallway for awhile. And the boys used to bite into their crackers and then smile at us showing their graham cracker covered teeth. Yuck!

Of all those school in the '40s and '50s, only Washington remains, and it has not been used as a school for some time. I wonder if buildings have feelings, and if so if Washington misses those children who made it such a busy place and those teachers who worked so hard teaching us. Every abandoned school I've ever known has eventually developed water damage inside -- do you suppose it's tears of loneliness now that its children are gone?

Washington School in later years

Jane Ann (Seright) Lemen, '59

northwest Indy

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