The Ggma Chronicles, Part 9: School Days and Homespun
Fear of Abandonment, The Rose Primer, and Flour Sack Drawers
The following was written by my maternal grandmother, Alice Green Kollenborn (1911-2005). The year is 1916. The Great War (later renamed World War 1) was raging in Europe, but America was not yet directly involved. "Dug Hill" is a community in northwestern Arkansas, between Bentonville (which lies a few miles south) and the Missouri line, which is a couple of miles north.
I started to school at 5 years of age at Dug Hill. I didn’t want to go, so my sister, Ruth, dragged me most of the way. I was the only one that knew why I didn’t want to start to school. I was used to our own world at home with Mama and our dogs, which spelled security for me. I had this terrible fear that something awful would happen to Mama and my dog if I wasn’t there. I always thought she might be gone when I got home; that fear stemming from the loss of Papa the year before. He never came back and I was sure Mama might go away to stay like he did.
I’ll never forget my first morning as we came up Dug Hill into the schoolyard. The boys were down on their knees playing marbles and everything looked so strange, I was frightened to death. I had never been to school before to see how it was.
I loved my “Rose Primer” with its green back and one huge red rose on the front. Books and magazines had always held a strange fascination over me. I loved the smell of new books, boxes of crayons, cedar pencil boxes filled with aromatic lead pencils, eraser and my little metal folding drinking cup Mama bought for me.
Every year Mama managed to scrounge up enough money to buy us kids new shoes, brand new books, pencil boxes, and one school dress for us girls and overalls, all handmade, for the boys. As soon as we got home from school we had to take our school clothes off and put on everyday clothes.
We generally had only one pair of shoes a year, wearing them during cold weather and going barefoot during the whole summer except when we went to Sunday School.
If Mama got a little extra money by some luck she bought us girls little patent leather slippers and short socks for Sunday School.
Our winter shoes were high-topped, generally with two buckles at the top and long black rib knit cotton stocking held up by garters or supporters fastened to a harness-like material generally made from muslin or flour sacks.
We wore flour sack underpants when I was little and not going to school. It was a proud day for me when Mama bought some pink gingham material for sister Mary and me and had our older sister Lill make us little gingham apron dresses with matching bloomers. They were beautiful, but we still wore our old flour sack panties at home. Even Mama and my older sisters wore flour sack drawers (as they were called).