We had moved from Varina to Fuquay before I started to school, and our house was just two blocks from “the old grammar school building”. I walked to and from school each day for 12 years from 108 East Street, and we never knew the dangers for young people that parents and students fear today. The worst of our walk might be some older student who did not like our slow gait or our hesitation in moving along the sidewalk. We were so innocent, and I think the rest of the world was more innocent then, too.
There were large doors in the center of “the old grammar school building” with wide steps leading to the front entrance. It was here that most of our class pictures were taken from first grade upward. On either end were smaller doors with steps leading up to them, and we used these side entrances for leaving the building at recess or at the end of the day. In the back was a large set of doors with wide steep steps, leading to the dirt area behind the building where the school buses unloaded and loaded students each morning and afternoon. The earth here was often covered with cinders from the furnaces that warmed the radiators in the grammar school building and other buildings in the complex. Each room had a number of radiators which kept you warmer than you wanted to be in the winter. There were no thermostats on those!
Each classroom had very tall and wide windows side by side the length of the room. There was a long pole which was used to unlock the windows and push them up for air in the fall and spring. Through these open windows students enjoyed fresh breezes (no air conditioning yet) and heard the sounds of other classes in outdoor activities. If a classroom were on the first floor, students in the classrooms might even see other students at play.
My first experience with “the old grammar school building” came in the spring of 1945 when I attended the Pre-School Clinic required of all students entering the first grade that fall. We were evaluated on 5 points – Nutrition, Nose and Throat, Eye and Ear, Posture, and Teeth. A healthy evaluation in each area earned the preschooler a blue star to be worn on the shoulder at the end of the preschool session.
With trepidation we entered as first graders in the fall. I was in the first grade class of Mrs. Margaret Johnson Barrett (a first cousin of my cousin Carroll Howard’s husband, Alfred Johnson, who became mayor of Fuquay for many years) on the end of the building near Ennis Street, and I can still remember the creosote smell of the wooden stairs and floors and the dark green paint of the hallways. The paneled classroom doors with brass hardware were huge with transoms over them for more air flow. The rooms were large with two doors in the back of the room for entering the cloak room which housed winter coats, book sacks as we called them, and playground equipment. It was often a dark and scary place. Large light fixtures hung from a high ceiling and illuminated our work.
The girls wore cotton dresses with sweaters and jodphurs underneath in the very cold weather. I always remember wearing clunky oxfords with socks which rubbed blisters no matter how much you had paid for them. The boys wore long pants or knickers with collared shirts and sweaters. Their shoes were usually scuffed from schoolyard play.
First graders sat at tables and moved into reading groups as they began the important task of learning various sounds and symbols of the written word. Our writing was large printing on lined paper with large pencils. During the year I was sick and in the hospital, missing a total of 26 days from school, but I still did well and learned all the lessons that Mrs. Barrett presented to us.
In the front of the room were really “black” blackboards with samples of upper case and lower case letters of the alphabet along the top. Mrs. Barrett would put a scene depicting each holiday on the blackboard with colored chalk. I remember that she used a stencil and connected the dots to make the scene. We were careful not to erase it until that holiday had passed. If we had been attentive that day, we were allowed to go outside and dust the erasers.
The boys’ and girls’ restrooms were in the basement and painted that dark green that added to the gloom of the area.
At the other end of the basement was the cafeteria where the ladies in white ladled out soup on Fridays and spoke kindly to the little people with the large trays in the lunch line. Our lunchroom ladies (as they were called) tried to make us feel at home, and we remembered them each year, as their picture was always in the yearbook. Lunches cost a dime and were usually not our favorite meals of the day. Some students brought their lunches in brown bags and bought milk for a nickel in the lunchroom. After I was older, I would go home for lunch.
Recess was about 15 minutes long in the morning, and we enjoyed a snack of fruit or peanut butter crackers wrapped in wax paper while we played chase, hide and seek, marbles, hopscotch, jump rope, London Bridge, Ring Around the Rosy, Farmer in the Dell, or Red Rover in the dirt yard in front of the building on East Academy Street.
When my first grade year ended in the spring of 1946, I was sad and knew that I would miss Mrs. Barrett. I heard her tell the other first grade teacher, Mrs. Grady, that she would love to have a Coca-Cola. I ran the two blocks home and got a cold bottle of Coca-Cola from the refrigerator and ran back, still carrying my report card for the year. I stumbled on the wooden steps and scraped my report card on the front, a mark that is still discernible today. Luckily, I did not break the glass bottle, but sadly I had forgotten the bottle opener, and so Mrs. Barrett did not get her refreshment.
We continued our classes in “the old grammar school building” through grade 2 with Mrs. Rhodes and Mrs. Whisnant into grade 3 with Mrs. Yancey and Miss Fleming until the middle of grade four with Mrs. Johnson and Mrs. Diehl when we moved to “the new primary building” farther north on Ennis Street across from Aiken Parkway. The cafeteria moved, too, to the building between “the new primary building” and the high school building which was almost as old as “the old grammar school building”. We returned to “the old grammar school building” for grade 5 with Mrs. Hopson and Miss Daniel, grade 6 with Mrs. Tatum and Mrs. Regan, grade 7 with Mrs. Arnold and Miss Adams, and grade 8 with Mrs. Haddock and Mrs. Hoy and added to the building’s history of educating the youth of our town. Those halls and classrooms continued to share with us the glory of success in schoolwork and the other happy and tragic events of our lives.
I will never forget the day in third grade when we learned that our classmate had been hit by a car and killed the previous evening. It was through those huge windows that we saw a military plane on a training mission go down in the western part of town one rainy afternoon and learned that the pilot had been killed. If we had been looking out those huge windows that day in December of 1952, we might have seen a classmate running back to class from the office of The Independent to tell us that the mayor of our town had been murdered in his medical office by a disgruntled patient.
Years later after I graduated in 1957, I went back into the building before it was razed. I was shocked that the huge rooms and halls of my earlier years were now normal size. It was true that they bore the signs of age and represented the education of another era. The creosote smell was still prevalent though fainter now and blended with the smell of dampness and mildew. Who knows what asbestos and black mold resided there?
When “the old grammar school building” came down, I retrieved a half a brick from the rubble which I still have today, and it still has that chalky residue. Maybe it will find a place in the Fuquay-Varina Museum someday. Our memories best serve us and others when they are documented and collected for all to appreciate.
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