I remember my first day of school. It was a one room school taught by one teacher, Miss Ruth Kuglar. [1] Today that school is a home. We walked the mile and one half one way each day and I missed school one year when we had whooping cough. The rest of my schooling until graduation I had perfect attendance. Brother John and I spoke Ukrainian to each other until I was in second grade. I remember exactly where we were when we spoke English for the first time. The second year until eighth grade my teacher was Miss Frances Park. [2] She lived in Frenchtown on Everittstown road. She walked about a mile to the railroad station, took an early train to Byram and walked two and a half miles to the school which was all up hill. In winter she had to start a fire in the pot belly stove to heat the building before the 34 children arrived. The boys (two) usually carried the drinking water in a pail with a broom stick between them. Years later, her brother Leon told me his sister in over forty years of teaching never earned more than six hundred dollars a year
In our elementary school we did not have modern toilets as we do today. There were two-seater outhouses, one for boys and one for girls. We boys would roll the outhouse on its side and into the farmer’s field some distance from where it stood. Then the teacher would make use bring it back. It always took much longer to bring back. One time we turned the girls toilet over, door side down only to find the teacher inside. We turned it upright only when she promised not to punish us. In those days teachers were allowed to use the switch. After vacations the next year we went to the outhouses only to find that the school board had put concrete bases on the toilets and installed bolts so they could not be removed. Thus ended the outhouse era!
About this time, a couple bought a farm near the school. Both husband and wife were Hungarians and could not speak English. Often we went across the fields to shorten our walk home. Several years this couple made haystacks and left them in the field until late fall or winter so when we crossed the field we took time out to take several slides down the haystack. When she saw us sliding on her hay she would come out of the house waving her arms and yelling in Hungarian. We stayed on the Hay until she was a couple hundred yards away and then we would slide down and run for home. Once or twice she came out of the house with a shotgun and fired into the air. The neighbors and our parents didn’t approve of her shooting the gun and so they formed a committee and went to her place and told her if she did that again they would get the police and she would go to jail.
Another time we picked cherries off her tree. There were about 9 boys who would be in the tree eating the cherries, and as with the haystacks, she would come running and waving her arms. We boys would jump down and run for home. Once we were all up in the tree eating when to our surprise there she stood under the tree with a stick in her hand and talking away in Hungarian. We were trapped so long as she stood there. Then one of the older boys got the idea to urinate on her[1]. That was more than she cared for and she got away from the tree. That gave us the chance to make an ignominious getaway.
While in grade school a part of the period we were supposed to have library, but there was none nearby. Our teacher gave us permission to walk across the Byram bridge and to the Pt. Pleasant library every couple of weeks. We used to go by way of the old Quarry road which exited almost directly across from the bridge entrance. That road is no longer in use, when the Rt. 29 was built quite a bit of the old quarry road was excavated during the widening. A couple of houses, the railroad station, and freight houses were removed for the widening and since the railroad buildings were no longer used after the train service was discontinued it was useless to have them standing. The Raven Rock property was also demolished. This all took place around 1950-60. In 1952 during the Delaware River flooding, the covered bridge at Byram was washed away and never rebuilt. The piers are all that remain.
While going to grade school, we went on many nature trips. Miss Park was interested in Nature and made sure we knew the natural sciences as well as she did. We would collect wild flowers, tree leaves, animal tracks in plaster of Paris casts, butterflies and moths, insects, bird nests, and identification of birds. We not only collected, we had to learn their names. She was a good teacher and we learned lessons we never forgot. [4] [5]
Editor’s Note:
[1] Stephen knew no english, nor the alphabet on his first day of school. For the first 2 weeks he spent his morning circling a single lower case letter in an old phone book, and in the afternoon the related capital letter. He did this from a to z. A non speaker in a 1 room schoolhouse must have been quite a challenge.
[2] Stephen certainly has a mischievous or naughty streak and would get paddled at school for his deeds. However, his mother was a strict disciplinarian and he was spanked, often severely, every single day when he got home. She would as John if Stephen was paddled and if the answer was “Yes” the he paid again, with interest. Miss Park found out, and she had kind heart. She began to send home notes that Stephen was very good at school today. It did not always prevent the home punishment, but it help.
[3] Let the record show that the “older boy” was the author.
[4] Stephen had one common practice that gave him the butterflies in his stomach. The boys in the school house would occassionally place .22 rimfire bullets on a large stone and fire them off by hitting the bullets with a hammer stone. Of course they did this at the schoolhouse and he often felt lucky that no-one got hurt.
[5] Later it is likely that Miss Park may have suffered from some malady like diabetes. Stanley or Walter mentioned that by the time he was at the school she would doze off in the afternoon. The “nature collection trips” afforded her some time to catnap.
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