Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
PUPILS OF YESTERYEAR
Sweet recollections of school, teachers, community
Wellington residents share their favorite back to school memories
Dottie Cann
Well since I’m a centenarian, I’m 100 years old, I go back a long way, and when I went to school it was very, very different. We didn’t have backpacks, and we didn’t have to buy our rulers, erasers and things. Instead, when we went to school the teachers gave them all to us when we got there. I am born and raised in West Chester, so I went to the West Chester Schools. And when I went to grade school, or elementary school, there was a school on High Street called the High Street School. It’s no longer there, but it was between Price Street and Dean Street. And everybody walked. In our days there were no buses.
When it is time for school to start it means an end of all the summer activities, and I can remember a lot of them, and the beginning of the school year. Some of the summer activities in West Chester at that time were at Everhart Park. And they had a Director of Activities, and the children all walked down there in the day time. I can remember making a basket of reed and raffia for my mother. And at the end of that season, before school started, they always had a big picnic at Everhart Park. And it was a big cookout, which was a lot of fun!
There was another thing that ended before school started that I remember. PM Sharpas had a beautiful home and an estate outside of West Chester and he had some lovely lakes. And one of the lakes, the big lake, he would allow the West Chester people to come to, to swim in the summertime. That’s where we went to swim, many of us, and we would walk two miles to get to the lake, swim all afternoon, and walk two miles home again. And there was always a life guard on duty, I imagine he had an arrangement with the borough perhaps or maybe with the YMCA, but there was always protection there. And that was one of the highlights before school started again, for all of us!
Nonie Stewart
I couldn’t wait to go back to school! And it was, there was no bus then, you walked to school, and you walked home for lunch, and you walked back to school. They had recess but they didn’t have any afterschool games at that point, it was a long time
ago because I’m 89! It’s so hard to remember it all but I did love school. I remember that!
I have two daughters…
I think they were anxious to go (back to school) particularly Kay, because she was an October baby, so she had to wait until the next year, she was my younger one. But I think they liked school. Now middle school is difficult for anybody! But they did
well. They played sports, they were very active, very active in scouts because I was their scout leader. And they went all the way through from the Brownies all the way through Cadets, both of them, and I was the leader of Cadets. So we did a lot of camping
and stuff!
Patsy Roseberry
Probably one of my favorite and probably different kind of back to school memories is during the war — I lived with my grandparents and I went to a two-room school with one teacher and
all the grades in one room and the second school room was used for rainy day play and exercise. It was a long walk, I walked by myself. In the winter it was wonderful because you would walk out in the snow and there would be nothing but the bird tracks and the squirrel tracks and the rabbit tracks to go up the hill to the school. My teacher was absolutely fantastic – I was in probably 2nd grade and everybody else was learning along the way, so I learned things from 6th grade on – it was really fun. In the summer the teacher was really great, he could make whistles out of sticks! I don’t remember what kind of tree it was, but he could take the tree, slip the bark, and he would make us all whistles. I wish I knew how he did that, it would have been fun to do with my kids! In the summer, one of the favorite games was marbles and we all played marbles, and I was actually pretty darn good! I took all the guys marbles! But I had to give them back, you couldn’t keep them forever. That’s probably one of the most vivid memories that I have.
Roy Roseberry
I’ll go back as far as I can remember when I first was in grade school, 1st, 2nd, 3rd grade, and we lived just a couple of blocks from the school and so it was an easy walk and easy to get used to all the new stuff that you had to going to school for the first time. We moved around quite a bit so I went to grade school in east Tennessee, two or three different towns in east Tennessee, and then went to school in Christiansburg, Virginia. This is still in grade school. And went to school in Kingsport, Tennessee, so we moved all over that part of the countryside. My memories are generally very good, I think I always looked forward to going to school and was always disappointed when school was
out for the summer. It’s an interesting thing to say that now because I’m not sure I felt that way back then, but I think so.
I had a lot of different experiences going to school in different towns and different states. My father was a chemical operator in the rayon mills in east Tennessee and then he went up to and worked in Radford, Virginia and he ended up being back in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. So we had varying experiences in living places and in the different schools.
My memories of school are generally favorable and sort of the same. Learning, no matter what state or city we were in. And the experience was always basically the same, going back and always meeting new people and making new friends. We did that a lot when I was a child, we moved around quite a bit.
I don’t have a real memory or a concept of learning, I’m sure I did! And then when I went to the University of Cincinnati from Oak Ridge High School, I actually got a scholarship my first year, and it was so different going from east Tennessee… going to Cincinnati, where I spoke differently from everybody else, my southern, hillbilly accent was a thing of interest to people. It gave them lots to talk about. It also impressed my teachers and professors because I still had my east Tennessee accent whatever it was at the time. As we moved all around it got changed, I’m not nearly as hillbilly as I used to be! It was greatly different at that point when I first went up to Cincinnati, and in Cincinnati they have their own particular accent!
Submitted and compiled by Danielle Paterno, Director of Community Relations, External Business Development, Wellington at Hershey’s Mill