Farm Girl (8 page)

Marker 25th wedding anniversary party

Chapter Seven:
The New Virginia Community

My father saw to it that we went to church every Sunday. Mother was Norwegian, and she’d just as soon go over to the Lutheran Church in the Norwegian community where she grew up. Her father, Hans Walstad, had helped organize that church, they even met in his home for awhile. Her mother, Sofie Walstad, was Ladies Aid president for years and years. That is where my parents were married

But Dad didn’t want to drive five miles to go there, you couldn’t go straight, you had to go around. This New Virginia Methodist Church was close, so that’s where we went.

For awhile, in the earlier years when I was small, the ministers would come out and people would invite them for dinner in their homes. Church lasted until twelve, and someone invited the minister and his wife to dinner afterward.

One Sunday Rev. Scofield was visiting at our house. Mother had chickens that had hatched and they were real tiny, so she had them behind the cookstove. I wanted to show Rev. Scofield the baby chickens so I picked one up, and he was real interested in them.

There was a Rev. Marshal who attended college in Hastings, and one time he brought a Chinese student to church. This Chinese student spoke to the congregation, and what I remember him saying is that it was hard to eat the rice cooked in this country because they put “too many waters in it.”

Rev. Marshal had a children’s time during church, when he’d have the children come up to the front. He’d tell us a story, sometimes using a chalkboard, and I always liked that. One minister had us sign a pledge not to smoke or to use alcohol, and I signed it. I was about twelve or thirteen, and later that influenced me.

I’d think, “I won’t do that because I signed a pledge.”

Rev. Bibb was the minister who talked to me, trying to get me to convince my dad to be baptized. None of the Markers were ever baptized. They weren’t very religious, and when they first came to Nebraska and the children were born, there wasn’t any church here back in the 1870’s. Later on when he was older, my dad felt too self-conscious to get in front of everybody and be baptized.

We only had worship service every other Sunday, because the preacher came out from Inavale and served the Inavale church, too. When we didn’t have a minister, we just held Sunday school.

I remember Norman Johnson reading the minutes, and it was always about forty, forty-two people to Sunday school. He was elected secretary when he was still a teenager, about eighteen.

Ray Wilson was the Sunday School superintendent for all the time. He’d always try to get someone else but no one else would do it. When it was cold, he’d come up early in the morning to build a fire in the coal furnace in the basement. A steel grate opened into the church, and everyone gathered around the heating grate to warm up. We had opening exercises and singing, then classes.

When I was nineteen, I couldn’t get home one weekend because of the rain, and that’s when they elected me teacher of the young people’s class. It was the class for anyone from thirteen up who wasn’t married, regardless of their age.

What a challenge, teaching that class. I started listening to the Spoken Word and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to get ideas.

I decided to hold a contest to increase our class attendance. I divided the class into two sides, and for a few months, whichever side had the most people in attendance would be the winners. The losers had to entertain the winners at a party and furnish the refreshments.

A few weeks after this announcement, I saw the young people’s side full, about thirty-five or forty just in my class. All the young people from the community came and some from neighboring communities as well, because they wanted to come to the party. Parties were a big thing out there. After all, we lived in the country, and there weren’t many parties where everyone could come. That contest really got people out to my Sunday School class.

Any parties were usually connected to family events. When my parents had their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in 1935, they had an open house during the day with a party in the evening for the young people. Mother really wanted me to have that party. It was announced in the New Virginia Church, the Lutheran Church, the Extension Club, as “everyone come” to the open house with a party in the evening for the young people. Word spread around, no invitations were sent out, it was just word of mouth.

Mother prepared food for the open house—sandwiches, cake, homemade ice cream, lemonade and ice tea. The leftover food from the open house we ate at the party that night along with more homemade ice cream.

We played Farmer in the Dell, Skip to my Lou, Ol’ Dan Tucker, a lot of games where you had circles where the boys went one way and the girls another, you marched around and wherever you stopped, that person would be your partner, then you and your partner went to the center. Those kinds of games were popular back then, even college students enjoyed them.

Whenever anyone got married, the community had a shivaree and made lots of noise by clanging pans together. There would be cake and other refreshments at the parent’s home, which is usually where the weddings took place. The couple would come out after they were married, and everyone played games. Sometimes there were hard feelings if things got out of hand, with people forcing their way into the house.

When I was a child, nobody had insurance, so to help the community, they had something called the 22 Club. Twenty-two people in the neighborhood got together for a party, usually an oyster supper in someone’s home, and contributed one dollar. It would be oyster soup made with milk and butter, with oyster crackers. You could buy a gallon of oysters in town, they weren’t so expensive back then.

When someone in the 22 Club got sick, the club took money from the treasury and paid the doctor bill. It was like community insurance. When the Drought and Depression started, it was discontinued because even a dollar would be too much for some families.

I went to Epworth League conferences with my New Virginia cousins and to Lutheran League conferences with my cousin Mildred Holt. She lived in the Norwegian community where everyone was Lutheran. Mother and I went over to the Norwegian community for the Norwegian Ladies Aid as well as going to the New Virginia Ladies Aid. For refreshments, when the Ladies Aid was at our house, we’d serve sandwiches and two or three cakes.

Mother’s heart was always in the Norwegian Church, even though we went to New Virginia. She had made a painting for the Norwegian Church, a mural on the wall above the altar, a picture of Jesus as a Good Shepherd holding a little lamb and a lamb by His side. That church burned down later and the painting was lost.

At Christmas we drew names at school and gave a present to whoever we drew. Everyone gave a present to the teacher, a handkerchief or something like that. We’d have a little party for the families, and the whole community attended the school program where we’d speak pieces, learn recitations, and have a little play.

Christmas Eve we always had a program at the New Virginia Church where we dramatized the birth of Christ and spoke pieces.

One year Mother made me a gray satin dress out of an old one that she had. I was feeling in the pocket and found a thread to pull on, and I tore the dress where the pocket was. It was a six inch tear, and when I spoke my piece in the program, I had to hold my hand a certain way to cover up the big hole in my dress.

We had a big Christmas tree at the church, who knows where they got it. There would be a lot of presents under it, and I’d always get two, one from the teacher and one from whoever drew my name in Sunday school class.

We had a couple Lambrecht families in the church, the south Lambrechts, the north Lambrechts, and the grandparents. The south Lambrechts had lots of children—Opal, Theola, Margret, and others—and these Lambrecht families celebrated their family Christmas at this party. They exchanged presents and each of the Lambrecht children would get six or eight presents.

I always felt so left out because there I was with two little presents when they had so many. I never liked that. The Brooks’ and the Lovejoys and me were the only ones who didn’t get a lot of presents.

On Christmas nights Mother, Dad and I attended the program at the Norwegian Church. They had lighted candles on the tree. There weren’t as many presents because the families didn’t exchange like they did at New Virginia. It was always nice to see their program, but I didn’t have a part since it wasn’t my community.

New Virginia Methodist Church

Country school children

School boys

Chapter Eight:
The Little Country School

The little country school was a half mile east of the church. The church was on a county road and the school on a private road, off the main county road. John Wilson, my dad’s uncle, gave the land for both. For the school, he donated three to five acres, a corner plot. There was plenty of parking, the school building, the outhouses and a little extra space.

I went to first through fourth grade at the original one-room school. A big stove over to one side had a metal circular protective ring around it, about four or five feet high, so kids couldn’t get too close and burn themselves. The ring would be warm but not hot like the stove.

The blackboards were on the north wall behind the teacher’s desk, covering the entire wall.

My first teacher, Mrs. Davis, stayed at our place. She had gray hair and wore satin dresses and pointed, high heel shoes that laced above her ankles. You never saw people in our neighborhood wearing shoes like that. Those were fancy shoes.

Mrs. Davis, an experienced teacher from Oklahoma, had the idea to start some younger kids in a “Beginners Class.” She thought I should start school early at age four and be in this class. I would finish kindergarten, or beginners class, and first grade in one year.

On my first day of school, Mother and Aunt Bernice sat in the back of the room because I didn’t want to stay. Then Opal Lambrecht, who was in first grade, came and took my hand, and that made me feel better.

Us beginners sat by the stove where the eighth graders would help us. We often colored, and one day someone had a box of crayons with a beautiful pink crayon. I’d never seen a box of crayons with that shade of pink in it, and I told my mother I had to have crayons with that pink for school. So she bought them for me, and that pink crayon was always the one used up first in my crayon box.

Once when a boy acted up, the teacher made him stand facing the blackboard. She drew a circle on the board and had him stand on his tiptoes with his nose touching inside the circle. When she turned her back to teach a class, he quickly erased the circle and drew one lower so he didn’t have to stay on his tiptoes.

We sat two to a desk, and one time I had a boil on my hip where it hurt to sit. Opal Lambrecht, my seat mate, changed seats with me so I could sit with my sore hip hanging off the seat.

In third grade, my seat mate was a new boy named Fay Lovejoy and oh, he was spoiled and kind of filthy-minded. I hated to sit with him. His parents were divorced, he lived with his father, and Fay talked kind of dirty and had bad manners. “I gotta go piss.” Or “I gotta sh--.” He swore all the time, saying “goddam it.”