Growing Up in Savonburg in the Sixties, Part 2

I've started a series of articles reminiscing about my childhood in a small Kansas town. If you missed it, you can read the first installment here. I talked about our phones, water supply, and doing the laundry. Now I want to talk about winters in our small town.

Heating the House

Our house only had a central gas heating stove, located in the family room. All of the bedrooms came off of this room, as well as the living room and the kitchen. In the winter, we closed all of the doors to the family room; which meant only the kitchen, the family room and the bathroom were heated and warm. About an hour before bedtime, we would all place bricks on the heating stove. When it was nearly time for bed, we would wrap the hot bricks in towels and place them between the sheets in our beds, usually where our feet would be. I shared a bedroom with my younger brother; it had an outside door on the North side of the house. There was little or no insulation in the walls and the outside door and windows had drafty air leaks. You could always see your breath in our bedroom and we slept under at least ten blankets and comforters; it was difficult to even move once these were rolled into place on top of us!

Sledding

The best part of the winters was when we had enough snow for sledding. The roads were never plowed in Savonburg and there was little traffic, so the roads were always available for sledding. Our neighbor would tie a rope to the back of his truck and pull us on a homemade toboggan. We could get six or seven kids on the sled at a time; sometimes, the driver would speed up a little going around a turn and we would "wipe out" as one kid would lose their balance and start to fall off the sled, pulling the rest of us like dominoes. After a sledding session, we would always go back to our neighbor's house and have hot chocolate milk, with milk from the dairy cows he kept in a pasture between our houses.

Electric fences

There was an electric fence around the cow pasture behind our house. This led to some mischief for me and my brother. As a budding electrical engineer, I understood the difference in conductivity of different materials. So, we would invite visiting kids to touch the electric fence with a stick and we would demonstrate with a dry stick, then hand them a green branch to duplicate what we had showed them was "safe" - never got old, as they say!

"Two room" Schoolhouse
The grade school had eight grades in two rooms - grades 1-4 in one room with one teacher and grades 5-8 in the other classroom with the "principal" teacher. There were only two other children in my grade - both boys born in August, the same as me, and one was even born on my birthday! With four grades for one teacher, the general "flow" was to teach a lesson to one grade and give them something to work on while moving on to the other grades, in sequence. If you were able to complete your assignments before the teacher got back to your grade, you were free to do what you wanted (staying in your seat, of course!) In fourth grade, I often listened to the lessons the teacher gave to the other (lower) grades.

Sometimes, I would correct her when she made a mistake. This practice did not endear her to me; she gave me a "D" in conduct one semester. However, at the end of the year, she told my Mom that she thought I should "skip" a grade, because I was well ahead of the rest of my grade. However, my Mom had skipped a grade when she was in grade school and regretted it later in high school, since she was younger than the others when people began dating. So, she kept me with my grade level.

From the older boys in school, I learned how to make paper airplanes and clothespin guns. To make a clothespin gun, you disassembled a wooden clothespin (with a spring) and re-configured it, so that the spring became a trigger and a launching mechanism. You would use the wooden side of another clothespin to be the "bullet". The gun would be cocked by pushing the spring back until it caught in the groove of the wooden side (where the coil of the spring would have been originally). Then you stuck the loose clothespin half in the gun, aimed it and pulled the trigger. It could shoot about ten feet. Great fun!

Foot Surgery and Crutches

The school was "across town" from our house, about eight blocks away, so we walked to and from school. When I was in fifth grade, I had foot surgery to correct for congenital club foot. I was on crutches for six weeks. During this time, my younger brother and sister pulled me to and from school in a wagon. They would always complain when they reached the railroad crossing, where they had to pull me up a steep incline. I learned to be very careful of water on the floor in the restroom while I was using the crutches. I was lucky that there were no stairs that I had to use during this time - I later learned that you have to be very careful going down stairs on crutches!

In the next installment, I will tell you about my grandparents.