You know how sometimes, you’re looking for something in particular online and you accidentally come across something that grabs your interest? I don’t remember what I was looking for, but I came across a Facebook post that featured pages of my elementary school newspaper. I’m not on Facebook, but it was apparently a public page, because I could scroll through the entire thing. It was fun to read the “news” we reported in grade school and to recognize the names of the kids I interacted with every day in school (50-60 students in eight grades) and around town (population about 200). In such a small school, we didn’t have a newspaper staff. Everyone contributed to the newspaper, with sections dedicated to the primary, intermediate, and upper grades. I selected some pages to post here. Most of them include an article by one of my brothers or by me.

I don’t remember the name of the newspaper–if it even had one–but this is how the grade-level sections were labeled. The last article in the left column describes how much my brother, Steve, wanted a horse. FYI, there weren’t many horses on the nearby farms, and I never saw a Palomino, but Roy Rogers, a 1950s TV cowboy, rode his Palomino, Trigger, on his weekly show. Maybe that counts as seeing Palominos “a lot,” as Steve writes.

Tom, another one of my brothers and younger than Steve, wrote a short paragraph for the “Miscellaneous Corner” about the earth (first article, left column). It sounds like his class was studying the solar system. Note that the page, like a real newspaper, includes a cartoon drawn by John Kappers, one of the primary grade students.

Denny, my oldest brother wrote about the radio programs that provided the 1950s equivalent of online learning (first article, right column). Small, rural schools like ours could not afford specialized instructors so, four days of each week, our classrooms tuned in to Wisconsin Public Radio and we followed the radio teachers’ instructions for singing (“Let’s Sing”), drawing (“Let’s Draw”), and writing (“Let’s Write”), and we also had some music instruction (“Music Time”).

In the last article in the right column on this page, Dale Wilterdink reports on who had which duties at school. The school janitor was always a woman from our small town (usually a classmate’s mom) who cleaned after school hours for a little extra spending money. Students were required to do minor duties after school to (1) assist the single janitor/schoolkeeper/mom and to (2) learn responsibility. Duties were assigned for either a 1- or 2-week period–I don’t remember which. I don’t think primary grade students had duties because I remember being in first grade and seeing Jimmy, an older student, clapping erasers outside after school to clean them. When Jimmy told me he was doing his duty, I didn’t have a clue what a duty was and I thought it might be a euphemism for a bodily function.

I still remember the African speaker we had at school one day. I wrote about him in the second article in the left column. Our area of Wisconsin was all white, so a person of color was a novelty. Not only that, but he was actually from Africa–a distant and exotic place that we were studying in Social Studies.

My story in the right column (second article) explains a scientific classroom mystery. I’m not sure why dried weeds needed water and, given that all of us had sandboxes at home filled with sand from the Lake Michigan beaches, I’ll bet that’s where the sand in the vase came from. Judging by the process I used to solve the morning glory mystery, maybe I should have been a research scientist!

Here’s a poem I wrote about Easter (first article, left column). The poem shows that I can provide rhythm and rhyme, but it doesn’t look promising for a future as a poet.

Just like the local newspapers our parents subscribed to, our school paper included a sports section. My brother, Denny, is reported as being a member of the basketball team (list of school team members, top of left column). We used to play against a few other small rural schools, complete with cheerleaders in matching outfits that their mothers sewed. None of the schools had a gym, so basketball practice and games took place in the local village community halls.

I love grade school jokes, and here’s a full page of them from the school paper. As our kids went through elementary school, Ted and I agreed that the fourth-grade jokes the kids told were the best, so maybe these were written by fourth-graders. Margie could draw very well, so that’s probably why she was drafted to draw the map of Italy and Sicily.

What newspaper would be complete without a crossword puzzle? It’s not the New York Times’ crossword, but it’s fun to read and to solve the clues.

The newspaper pages I found on Facebook are apparently from a variety of editions of the school newspaper. Since every student wrote an article for the paper, I can’t imagine a single student contributing more than one article to any edition of the “news.” The former student who saved these pages probably saved the ones s/he was most interested in (i.e., those with articles by people close to her/him), which could explain why I found three articles I wrote, only two with Denny’s name, and only one each for Steve and Tom.

Theo, our grandson, recently had a high school assignment to interview someone who was alive in the 1950s. (I saw all the kids in his group contacting their grandparents for this one!) One of the questions he had for me was, “What would you do differently growing up?” My answer was, “Nothing. It was fun,” and that’s the truth.