Jan 3, 2010 by Naomi.

In Googling for names of kids I went to grade school with, I discovered the 3 story building was registered as a Minnesota Historic Building in 1987 with a period of significance from 1925 to 1949. That covers a couple of years before I was born until the year I was married. It is a large building that had classrooms for grades One through Four on the main floor and grades Five through Eight on the second floor. Each floor had an entry the width of the building for coats and lunchpails. Only four feet of the basement was underground. It was used for storage and contained a large coal fired furnace, a connected room full of chunks of coal for the winter. They were not briquets but chunks.

Winters in Minnesota can get very cold. I have a photo of the building that has a snow drift between it and the playground that goes up to the roof. The old snapshots I have of kids beside the building do not have any identifying names at all. I simply have looked at them frequently enough to keep recalling some names. Anyway I do not know my second grade classmate’s names for certain. This reminds me I must label them. I learned the folly of not writing names down when I looked at my mother’s albums and do not know the names of her cousins. She noted the date as if it mattered the girl’s picture was taken in 1924, not who, but when. Photos in those days were rare and in my artistic zeal I disfigured several.

I remember the #55 school building was a Meeting Hall, a gathering place for wonderful socials, dances, songfests, seasonal festivals and Grange meetings. I’m sure I performed in every Christmas pageant those grade-school years. I have several certificates for winning spelling contests, too. The Internet shows that the vacant building has the owner listed as private. Probably because each section requested a farmer to designate an acre for a school building which reverted back to the landowner when the school closed. Regardless of the temperatures there will be no freezing pipes. The schoolhouse had no plumbing. The one time I drove by I came down from Hackensack on US 71, now renumbered Minnesota 13. Will there be a building there when next I drive down that long highway?

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Jan 3, 2010 by Naomi.

She was due on December 25 but Nancy came in her own good time, on January 3, 1952, less than two years after Michael’s birth. Ron borrowed a hundred dollars from Roland Wylie to remodel the garage on the lot next to Carrie Sherer’s when our second baby was expected. The door opened to the kitchen which took up the southern most part of the building. There was no plumbing. And the well was far behind Carrie’s house. I carried water from a pump that stood on a slab above a six foot deep hole dug and reinforced with convex concrete blocks through which a four inch cylinder was driven into water bearing gravel. I wore a deep path to supply water needed for the many cloth diapers washed during those baby days. We had a stove and refrigerator. Our double mattress folded up to the wall during the day. Michael slept in an alcove in the southwest corner. Ron worked at the paper mill which paid well. His mother thought that was the most wonderful security to which any man could aspire. He had attended St Cloud college on the GI bill with but one quarter left of the four year requirement. I encouraged him to quit the mill job and finish that last quarter. Michael and Nancy sat beside me as he received his BA degree. In-law criticism was not worth facing so we left Minnesota and went west. Nancy received her BA degree some years later from Western Washington University in Bellingham, a rainy coastal city where she still resides. Happy Birthday.

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