1 From Farm to School
In my eightieth year the scene remains sharply etched on my mind. On a sunny summer day, I stand in the driveway of our Iowa farmstead and tell the Kramer boys: “I will not attend school.” Secure in the wisdom of their advanced years and having just completed the second and third grades Clyde and Milt declare: “You must go! It is the law!” I stubbornly insisted I would not. They were right, of course. I dutifully marched off to kindergarten holding Mother’s hand on September 3, 1946, and subsequently devoted the remainder of my life to schooling. I graduated from Central Community High School at nearby Elkader in 1959; the State College of Iowa in 1963 with a B.A. in Social Science – Teaching; and the University of Iowa in 1969 with a Ph.D. in History. I taught one year as a sabbatical replacement at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion and thirty-seven years at Concordia College, a small institution Norwegian Lutherans established at Moorhead, Minnesota, in 1891. My career was that of an academic backwoodsman educated and employed far from nationally ranked colleges and universities. It is worth recounting because there were a lot more professors like me than Ivy League stars like Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr. and Doris Kearns Goodwin, and our ordinariness as well as achievements at small church-related colleges like the one at which I taught are an important part of the American higher educational experience.
Farm Family Life
My fourth-generation farm family descended from mid-nineteenth-century German and Norwegian immigrants who likely arrived with an ability to read and write. Their children attended country schools and some may have completed eighth grade after that was mandated by law in the 20th century. There is little in this ancestry to suggest I would be destined for a college teaching career even when Father and Mother graduated from Elkader High School. He briefly enrolled at the newly founded Elkader Junior College until coincidently dropping out when the stock market crashed in 1929. She completed a twelve-week normal course at Upper Iowa College in Fayette the following summer. Yet she taught only one term because rural school district board members preferentially hired their own relatives and friends.
After Mother and Father married and eventually started farming, they assigned my brother and me chores to instill the work ethic they had learned from their parents. Chores were good for children. They inculcated sound habits, developed useful skills, and molded character. At age six, I restocked the wood box and collected corn cobs for Mother to start fires in the kitchen stove; shelled corn, fed the chickens, and gathered eggs; brought in a fresh bucket of drinking water from the outside well; and dried the supper dishes while she washed. As I grew, chores did too. At age eleven, I put down hay bales from the loft and fed the cattle and horses; carried buckets of water from the stock tank to the calves and the chickens; and started milking cows by hand morning and night. In my teens, I cleaned the cow and hog barns on Saturday mornings, spread the manure on fields, and hauled straw from the stack as fresh bedding for the livestock.
During summers, I drove tractor on the hayfork to mow hay, on a hay wagon while men loaded bales, on the binder grandfather operated while cutting oats, and on hayracks while Father and other men loaded bundles for threshing. When he bought a small, used combine, I hauled oats from the field and unloaded it into the granary. In addition to showing me how to work, Mother and Father taught thrift and sobriety. “Making do” with cheaper or repurposed goods was a way of life. They never used credit cards and always paid cash. Diligent application or willful neglect of industry, thrift, and sobriety explained a farm family’s success or failure according to them. Mother and Father had a great fund of practical knowledge required for making a farm operation economically viable. Good mechanical skills facilitated his purchasing used machinery and keeping it in good repair. Her large garden stocked the kitchen table with fresh produce and supplied large quantities of vegetables supplemented with purchased boxes of peaches, pears, and cherries for canning each summer. Eggs, milk, and meat from the farm similarly reduced the quantity of groceries purchased weekly and saved money. Had I been less stubborn and more curious, I could have acquired much more useful knowledge from farm life.
My busy parents had little time for leisure reading, yet elements of middlebrow culture made its way into our home. They bought the Des Moines Sunday Register at the local Rexall Drug Store and subscribed to the Dubuque Telegraph Herald as well as magazines that rural free delivery put in our mailbox Monday through Saturday. Only the newspaper comic and sport pages interested me. Father read the paper, the Farm Journal, and Wallace’s Farmer by light of an Aladdin Lamp at the kitchen table after supper. Mother perused the Ladies Home Journal and McCall’s when resting from her perpetual cooking, clothes washing, gardening, and other domestic chores. She also subscribed to The Open Road for Boys for my brother until he lost interest and then for me until shortly after 1953 when Boy’s Life absorbed it. Both periodicals featured adventure stories, articles about sports and hobbies, and advertisements for the Red Ryder air rifle and other objects boys desired. As a teen, I dropped Boy’s Life to take Sport, a monthly filled with full page color photographs and well written articles about the lives of baseball, football, basketball, and hockey stars. I regularly bought satirical Mad Magazine at the drug store newsstand, but I could not read news magazines to which my parents did not subscribe. A kind neighbor, who knew my love for history, gave me copies of Life when it serialized Winston Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples.
The national comic-book craze made me an early reader. I started out looking at the pictures in those my brother had acquired and then advanced to reading just before entering the first grade when a neighbor gave me the collection her daughters had outgrown. When elitist criticism of morally subversive comics spawned Classics Illustrated, graphic versions of James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and other literary works later motivated me as an adult to acquire and actually read paperbacks of these and other classic texts.
Books available at home may have fostered unknowingly my interest in higher learning. I often read biography and history articles from two encyclopedia sets that Mother and a neighbor had acquired as reference libraries for teaching rural schools. I spent hours studying my parents’ country school textbooks. The Pictorial History of the United States authored by Charles Morris featured engravings that illustrated inspiring events in American history and stressed instances of heroic valor advancing settlement and national progress. Arthur C. Perry and Gertrude A. Price American History similarly held the interest of “barbaric” ten-to-twelve-year-olds by recounting dramatic events, adventures, and heroic deeds. Similar to the comic book heroes I admired, virtuous patriot George Washington saved America from the villainous greedy scoundrel Benedict Arnold.
Reading—a standard common school subject like history—was similarly used to teach character and citizenship. My parents had saved five volumes of the graded Baldwin and Bender Readers. The tan hard covers displayed dark brown lettering and an image of a lighted torch. Well-known psychologist James Baldwin and Buffalo, New York, primary grade supervisor Ida C. Bender compiled the best thoughts of Anglo-American culture for children to study. Numerous black and white illustrations highlighted prose and poetry selections written by Oliver Goldsmith, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Rudyard Kipling among others. Classics Illustrated Comics whetted my appetite for studying them. Other books in our home library—acquired as gifts from relatives—had less redeeming value. Even so I repeatedly read the adventures of American RAF pilot Dave Dawson and his English pal Freddy Farmer as well as youthful sleuths Joe and Frank Hardy and Jim and Don Mercer. Inability to acquire more tales about these heroic youth frustrated me.
After discovering the small Elkader Public Library as a fifth grader, I read Bob Feller’s Strikeout Story about an Iowa farm boy and World War II veteran turned sports hero, and Jackie Robinson: My Own Story about an African American who desegregated major league baseball. My favorite novels were those written by John R. Tunis. His modern sports stories created the juvenile fiction market during the Forties. His football novel, All American (1942), featured an African American character and pioneered the treatment of race for adolescent readers. Keystone Kids (1943)—one of eight novels Tunis penned about the Brooklyn Dodgers—addressed anti-Semitism. Fair play and good citizenship were important to Tunis; he always stressed values over victory. The visions of future history that many popular science fiction titles depicted attracted me to the genre. Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950) remains my favorite book.
A battery-powered console radio in the living room and Saturday night movies at the Elkader Theatre schooled me in American popular culture. Morning and evening news broadcasts that punctuated Mother’s listening day heightened my awareness of current events. Listening to comedians Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Red Skeleton, and Fred Allen honed my wit and sense of humor. “Amos and Andy” and “Beulah” taught me what little I knew about African American life even when White actors played Black characters. War and western films like Sands of Iwo Jima and The Searchers starring John Wayne shaped my notions of manhood. Biblical epics Qua Vadis and The Robe dramatized ancient life and the faithfulness of Christians faced with persecution.
The United States fought the First and Second World Wars in the name of democracy and propagandized both as epic struggles to preserve American freedom from German tyranny. Even after Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and authoritarian Japan surrendered, wartime habits of mind easily carried over to the new Cold War struggle between Democratic West and Communist East. Mother and I heard alarming radio broadcasts about Winston Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech, the Berlin Airlift, Russia’s atomic bomb test, and communists taking over China and invading South Korea. Newsreels offered disturbing images of communist world expansion and colonial peoples of color creating independent nations in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. George Orwell’s allegory Animal Farm depicted the evils of Soviet communism and his dystopian novel 1984 envisioned a grim future dominated by totalitarian governments waging perpetual war. Dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had incinerated 120,000 civilians instantly. Nations had no defense against this new kind of death. A newspaper account showing the blast radius of an atom bomb dropped within sixty miles on the small industrial city of Cedar Rapids made real my annihilation in the event of war with the Soviet Union.
Movies mirrored an ambivalent, pessimistic culture made more conservative by Cold War tensions and demonization. More Americans found it harder to feel good about an imperfect world in which flawed humans faced an unending struggle against unsolvable problems. Cruel, criminal communists populated several films and showed no respect for America. Gloomy film noir crime thrillers popularized the idea of contingency in which chance events threatened the lives of ordinary people. Popular musicals, on the other hand, offered audiences the solace of traditional family-centered values. Yet by the Sixties, even westerns had lost their distinctions between good and evil, lawmen and outlaws, and Whites and Indians. Since the United States could not force Soviet communism from Eastern Europe without risking nuclear war, it attacked communists domestically, blacklisting them, banning books, and censoring movies.
To cope with Cold War anxieties, Americans turned to religion. Formal church affiliation reached its highest point in the Fifties, rising from 43 percent (1920) to 69 percent (1960). An amazing. 96 percent reported a specific religious affiliation to the Census Bureau. President Eisenhower, who believed religion had value to the nation, instituted a series of national prayer breakfasts. My parents, who attended church, but did not read scripture or pray at meals, had me baptized, Sunday schooled, and confirmed at age thirteen.
Literature scholar Gerald Graff claims young people more likely acquire intellectual skills from reading interest absorbing comic books, sports magazines, and adventure novels than they do studying classic literary texts. They learn how to make arguments from haggling with friends about sports, games, personal traits, and ideas acquired from their reading. Yet I formed better reading than arguing skills. As a farm kid, I spent more time alone than I did with friends. Mother and Father did not comment on and argue about daily radio newscasts and newspaper accounts or their political and religious opinions. Other rural residents similarly shunned political and religious debates perhaps to perpetuate cordial community relations. At meals, my family talked mostly about the weather, farm work and prices, weather, neighborhood gossip, weather, and my many shortcomings. The constant nitpicking irritated, aggravated, and exasperated me. My parents cared more about cultivating industrious habits than they did honing capacity for rational thought and intellectual debate.
While Father sounded anti-intellectual in castigating my bookish habits, he knew college going had become more important after the Second World War. Veterans aided by the G.I. Bill helped push collegiate numbers to 2.5 million; enrollments continued rising to 3.63 million by 1960 and then more than doubled to over 8 million a decade later due to surging eighteen-year-old baby boomers. Revenues multiplied nine-fold from $2.4 billion (1950) to $21.5 billion (1970); faculty members rose from 190,353 (1950) to 551,000 (1970); and the number of bachelor degrees awarded more than doubled to 792,317 while earned doctorates increased five-fold to almost 30,000 by 1970. Five sons and daughters from three adjacent farms attended college in the forties and fifties. Brother Don’s enlistment in the United States Army qualified him for G. I. Bill higher education benefits just before these expired on January 31, 1955. Despite Father’s urging, he did not attend college. Still, their discussion made me aware that higher education was possible for me.
The Elkader Public School
From the time I marched off to kindergarten until graduating in a class doubled by consolidation, I loved schooling a lot more than farming. In 1936, the Elkader School Board replaced an old building destroyed by fire with Iowa’s first glass-block schoolhouse, and paid for it with fire insurance, a bond issue, and Public Works Administration funds. Residents proudly hailed the new two-story structure and its spacious landscaped lawn as “beautiful” and “world-renown.”
The Superintendent promised “Education for Citizenship,” comprised of the pervasive progressive, life-adjustment pedagogical ideals that dominated my schooling. We were trained “to live efficiently and effectively” through curricular and extra-curricular activities that oriented us toward “intelligent living,” “community improvement,” and “civic betterment.” We acquired knowledge of history, literature, music, national political and economic institutions, science, mathematics, health, and physical fitness. Progressive education fostered stability and order by identifying American society with democracy, instilling conformity, discouraging deviancy, and directing students toward meeting national needs. After Sputnik in 1957, Arthur Bestor, Jr. and Admiral Hyman Rickover blamed life adjustment education’s lack of academic rigor for the United States falling behind Soviet science. Their criticisms spawned more rigorous academic courses too late to benefit me.
Overcrowding further lessened the quality of my Elkader public education. Enrollment rose from 287 (1946-1947) to 565 (1958-1959). Post-war baby boomers steadily enlarged the kindergarten and elementary grades after 1952, competing for space with ever more numerous secondary students bussed into town after consolidation with the hamlets of St. Olaf, Littleport, Elkport, and Garber. The study hall was divided into two classrooms and the lunchroom became a study hall. I had eighth-grade civics in the upper library; tenth-grade English in the lower library; eleventh-grade typing on the stage; and twelfth-grade speech in the auditorium. My classmates had farm shop in the city park shelter house. Not until 1958 would cost-conscious district voters finally approve expending $395,000 on the badly needed addition that gave me my first non-farm related summer employment after getting my diploma. I worked with the construction crew that poured the footings and, later, the plumbers that laid the soil pipe.
On my first day of school, the pungent odor of cleaning chemicals and the sight of freshly waxed floors greeted me as they subsequently would at the start of each new term. My classes numbered about twenty until sixth grade when additional pupils from closed one-room country schools pushed the total to more than thirty. My teachers were young, unmarried females or older married women usually holding two-year certificates earned from Iowa State Teachers College or one of the state’s private liberal arts schools. Always kind and generally competent, they recorded daily attendance and tardiness and enforced discipline. They reprimanded the unruly, kept them after school, placed them outside in the hall, sent notes home to their parents, or ordered them to the principal’s office. Parents generally backed the school’s discipline.
Primary and elementary pupils sat at fixed desks ordered in rows. We occasionally viewed films and also attended all-school assemblies in the auditorium at which high school musical and dramatic groups performed or visitors presented edifying programs. We took field trips to the courthouse, water plant, and newspaper office. We viewed Walt Disney’s Cinderella at the Elkader Theatre just as high schoolers attended War and Peace a few years later. The popular culture imparted by movies, radio, and, later, television generally expanded our limited rural, small town existence with information about other countries and cultures. The churches our parents attended further broadened our outlook with Christian and biblical instruction.
Superintendents underscored academic diligence by listing those who had attained perfect attendance and the honor roll (B average or better) in the Clayton County Register. I made the honor roll more frequently in the elementary grades (94 percent) than I did in the primary grades (67 percent). My perfect attendance rate improved as well from 53 to 65 percent. I enjoyed seeing my name in print although failing to achieve these distinctions did not trouble me. Learning came easily without homework through an endless repetition of daily drills in the three R’s. Kindergarten featured a folio of the Dick and Jane Reader mounted on a stand that we all could see. Instructors read aloud to us throughout the primary grades to calm us after noontime play. We especially enjoyed The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore and The Story of Babar the Elephant. We marveled at going on vacation, a phenomenon unknown to most of us, and the adventures of a Parisian-educated elephant that returned to the jungle as king and spread civilization. As we gained proficiency, we took turns reading aloud. To reward those who finished their work early, teachers let us check out appropriate books from the school library. I preferred exciting tales about such English heroes as King Arthur and Robin Hood as well as the exploits of American pioneers Davy Crocket and Kit Carson. We conquered the complexity of cursive writing by practicing penmanship frequently. Weekly spelling tests and daily arithmetic worksheets challenged us in every grade. The subjects of science, social science, and history appeared as we acquired basic skills and knowledge.
Two or three times weekly, we left our classrooms for music and physical education. Sometimes we listened to classical recordings like Peter and the Wolf, and more frequently sang an assortment of songs among which we most enjoyed American folk tunes. The women’s PE instructor taught us kickball and other games during the primary grades. In upper elementary, she retained the girls while the men’s coach took the boys. We now wore gym clothes, took showers, and learned to hate the muscle soreness induced by the annual tumbling units. Elkader did not have an art instructor. Classroom grade school teachers instead assigned art projects for Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the birthdays of Lincoln and Washington. We cut and pasted, drew and colored, darned potholders, and carved animals or other objects from bars of soap. Music and physical education, however, obligated everyone to display their skills in public programs staged for parents and other interested townspeople. Vocal music instructors cast seventh and eighth graders for operettas while elementary pupils danced or sang in the chorus. They also joined band directors in conducting annual Christmas Chapel programs of readings and carols for all-school assemblies. Choral groups staged Christmas cantatas always well attended by the public. Many of us had the additional challenge of reciting or singing at the annual Christmas Eve programs our respective churches presented.
Starting in December 1947, the National School Lunch Program gave us an opportunity for eating warm midday meals. Only about 50 percent of schools took part nationally. Elkader housewives cooked according to Iowa Department of Education Hot Lunch Division standards. Lunch consisted of surplus commodities the government supplied: half pints of milk; canned peas, peaches, tomato paste, and tomatoes; peanut butter, dry beans, dried apricots, grapefruit sections, and orange juice; processed cheese, butter, and cotton seed oil shortening; and frozen ground beef or canned beef and gravy. By 1950 at Elkader, the program daily fed one hundred students—about one-third of those enrolled. Federal subsidies of five or six cents and student fees of twenty or twenty-five cents per meal covered the costs. Disliking long lines and unappealing fare, I usually brought a cold lunch that Mother packed: tasty meat sandwiches, bars or cookies, and fruit supplemented with hot cocoa or soup during frigid weather. I only bought hot lunch when “sloppy Joes” were served and everyone endured afternoon “onion breath.”
The noon hour, as well as morning and afternoon recess, leavened the elementary school routine. The school playground had a slide, swings, and high bars with a trapeze, a low bar for chin-ups or hanging, a ladder for climbing to the top, and a set of parallel bars for sliding to the ground. The bars would be considered too dangerous in today’s litigious society. Female decorum limited them to boys-only while girls played hopscotch or jumped rope on the sidewalk. We also staged games of tag or hide and seek around the busses or in the landscaped trees and shrubs. On winter days with newly fallen snow, we joined in games of fox and geese below the school on Molumby Field by the Turkey River. We competed there in softball and touch or even tackle football as we grew. Cold days kept us indoors for recess and in the gymnasium during the noon hour. Falls and collisions produced cuts, scrapes, and bruises without parents suing.
Life adjustment education philosophy committed Elkader Public Schools to preventive health care. Each class marched out of the building to a mobile x-ray unit that screened for tuberculosis. We received sight and hearing tests as well as smallpox and polio immunizations when the Salk vaccine became available. Hygiene classes taught everyone how to keep their hair, hands, bodies, and teeth clean. Yet brushing one’s teeth every morning without flossing and annual checkups and cleanings did not constitute adequate dental hygiene as my many fillings, crowns, and bridges prove.
Junior and Senior High
Junior high marked a bewildering transition. Adolescent hormonal urges impelled a surprising interest in the opposite sex. Some girls and boys now danced together at seventh and eighth grade parties while others looked on with disbelief, disdain, or desire. We had little guidance for dealing with turbulent emotions further stimulated by movies, music, and magazines marketing goods through sex appeal. Most parents did not talk about “it.” Older peers imparted only half-truths. We observed pets and farm animals mate, and studied couples starting to pair off. We shared information gleaned from fumbling encounters and gossiped about boys who were “fast,” girls who were “easy,” shotgun weddings of boys and PG girlfriends, and girls sent away to deliver babies put up for adoption.
By the Forties, Parent Teacher Associations (PTA) backed formal sex education that moved beyond venereal disease prevention and focused on health, family living, and human relations in teaching youth to avoid sexual activity as immoral and dangerous outside marriage. An Elkader PTA did not form until late 1955, and the district did not formally teach about sex in my time. Yet all girls took a required two-year home economics course. All sophomores studied sexual growth and reproduction in biology. Health and physical education classes encouraged everyone to care for their appearance. School-sponsored social activities developed appropriate masculine and feminine behaviors required for heterosexual pairing, marriage, and procreation. Homecoming king and queen candidates were presented as couples at the parade, pep rally, football game, and dance. Class parties encouraged heterosexual mixing, starting in seventh grade and continuing throughout high school. Friday night senior high sock hops after home football and basketball games featured a high-fidelity record player, a stack of Glen Miller LPs, and couples dancing (a few more skillfully than most) in the dimly lit gymnasium. We eventually supplemented classic swing music with the bunny hop and rock and roll. Teachers chaperoned, maintained decorum, enforced the ban on alcohol and cigarettes, and concluded these events at a suitable hour. Couples then departed together in cars and carried on informal sexuality studies until parental established curfews sent them home.
Annual homecoming dances and junior-senior proms similarly cultivated social skills adults deemed worthwhile. Homecoming queen, king, and court attired in suits and formals were presented at the post game dance in the gymnasium. Juniors raised money for hosting seniors at the spring banquet and prom by selling concessions at football and basketball games as well as magazine subscriptions door to door. Attendees donned suits and formals for the dinner and dance. The Peace United Church of Christ Women’s Guild often catered the meal. An orchestra played in a gymnasium transformed into “Shangra La” or “Treasure Island” with stage lighting, crepe paper streamers, and assorted structures. Two first-run movies at the Elkader Theatre capped the all-night affair.
Competitive dating system conventions governed behavior and excluded many from participating. To rate, males needed cars, cash, and proper attire; females must have personality, clothes, and beauty. Pretty girls might attend four proms; ordinary mortals went to two or none. Females enforced the limits on sex, and boys generally complied. Most girls kissed, but a few did not or limited their date to a good night kiss at the door. Most did not pet, but a few did. Some going steady engaged in sexual intercourse while others did not progress beyond necking. The system pressured females to be sexually interesting without being permissive. They endured the “male gaze” in public places and harassment by overly aggressive males on dates. Biologist Alfred Kinsey’s reported more sexual activity than expected during the supposedly restrictive Fifties; fiction and memoirs revealed much frustration with initial sexual experiences. I paired up in junior high, dated or picked up girls throughout high school, and attended formal winter balls held by the Masonic-related Rainbow Girls Chapter as well as the high school prom.
The Great Depression- and Second World War induced insecurities that encouraged young people to court and marry in higher numbers at earlier ages. Hence, American media celebrated youthful matrimony and stressed dating as essential for mate selection. Among twenty-nine girls in my class at the start of high school, six dropped out and married; seven wed within twelve months of graduation. Some enjoyed happy, long-lasting unions. Others did not. Most paid a price for not taking advantage of their educational opportunities. Popular culture had assured them academics did not count in mate selection. Several boys similarly left at age sixteen. Neither they nor the girls foresaw lifetimes working at low-wage jobs.
Elkader High School lacked academic rigor. Freshmen enrolled in English, General Mathematics, and General Science. Sophomores took Algebra, Biology, and English. They might elect Drivers Education as a fifth subject. The state two-year vocational education requirement mandated Home Economics for girls and either Agriculture or Shop for boys. American History and American Literature were required for juniors, who also elected two from Geometry, Physics, Physiology-Anatomy, World History, Bookkeeping, Typing, and Agriculture. All seniors took American Government and three from Advanced Algebra, Chemistry, English Literature or Speech, Shorthand, and Agriculture. No one could make appointments with a guidance counselor or study Trigonometry, Calculus, or French, which had been dropped with the junior college program in 1948. Faculty rarely assigned homework or used audio-visual aids. They lectured on and we recited from assigned textbooks. Annual turnover frequently subjected us to inept, inexperienced teachers. Among a staff of nine men and four women, just four stayed throughout my four years. The most capable soon left for better jobs in bigger towns. Family ties fortunately kept two superior individuals until their retirement. Appreciative students dedicated yearbooks to them.
English instructors were expected to teach writing. Yet during the “drill and kill” Fifties, schools isolated grammar from subject matter. Publishers pushed the sale of John Warriner’s grammar and composition textbook so strongly that many states recommended its use in every local district. Most teachers, who did not have college courses in writing instruction, likely found grammar easier to teach and evaluate. Besides, student loads of one hundred or more made grading themes a burden. Unfortunately, diagramming sentences and doing grammar worksheets did not create the better writers that parents and school boards expected.
Although I did not learn grammar or how to write well in high school (or even college and graduate school), I wrote more than most of my peers for the high school newspaper—The Tatler. My best work was a humorous class history, comedic prophecies for the Class of 1958, comedy sketches based on Steve Allen’s “Man in the Street Interviews” for the high school’s “Hello Day” and “Homecoming Pep Rally” as well as a youth meeting at Peace United Church of Christ, and “They All Spell Monster” for Radio Speaking Competition. All were leavened with ideas stolen from Mad Magazine.
During the eighth, ninth, and tenth grades, an academic slump removed me from the honor roll. Did adolescent angst spawned by pathetic pining for girls fog my mind? Did I stop paying attention when strict disciplinarian and “scold.” Harold Biedermann displaced a succession of seven female homeroom teachers? Perhaps two years of mandatory vocational education paralyzed me with boredom? Vocational subjects had been introduced into an exclusively academic curriculum in the Twenties when more teenagers began attending high school. Many of them craved the variety practical training provided. For my part, I refused to take Agriculture and intensely disliked the man who taught Shop. Father could not understand my stubborn refusal to learn useful skills; he often thundered in frustration: “You can’t make a living from books!” As someone who ranked in the 96th percentile for academic ability on the Iowa Educational Development Test, I clearly should have done better. Although no teacher spoke to me about not achieving my potential, the friendship of two college-bound graduates turned me around academically. Their future plans moved me to think about mine. Becoming a high school senior no longer seemed an adequate life goal. Hence, I became more focused on academic and extra-curricular achievement, improving my grades dramatically.
The Elkader school board shifted to eight forty-five minute periods to boost extra curricular participation starting in junior high. Award assemblies ended each academic year, signifying the importance educators placed on activities and achievement. Frosty Westering, a remarkable coach who began his career at Elkader between 1952 and 1956 and later would be elected to the College Football Hall of Fame, stimulated my deep love for sports. He taught us football, basketball, baseball, and track fundamentals in season. Father did not share my enthusiasm for these activities or the man I thought walked on water. Instead, he stressed how diligent performance of farm chores would better develop an adult sense of responsibility. Similar paternal attitudes kept many of my peers from taking part in sports or other extra-curriculars. Nevertheless, I took part in junior high football, basketball, and baseball, and high school basketball and football. As a privileged male, the Central School District’s failure to sponsor female athletic teams did not trouble me. Girls were restricted to GRA, which had a faculty adviser, student officers, weekly play nights, and an annual field day for which winners received blue ribbons.
More, including a higher percentage of girls, took part in vocal and instrumental music than any other activity. More girls than boys performed as soloists and vocal and instrumental ensemble members. Off-key singing kept me from vocal music, but similar lack of talent did not keep me from being a poor percussionist in band from the eighth to tenth grade. Dressed in uniforms with white-trimmed red trousers and double-breasted coats, and wearing white buck shoes, we performed at fall and spring concerts in the school auditorium, and executed dance steps and military maneuvers at home football games, college homecoming and Veterans Day parades, and the Eastern Iowa Band Festival at Cedar Rapids or Waterloo in the spring.
Lorene Lenth was my most remarkable teacher. She instilled middlebrow cultural tastes through directing forensics and plays; teaching American Literature, English Literature, and Speech; and recommending the superior TV program “Playhouse 90” to her classes. Miss Lenth urged higher education, claiming, “The purpose of college is to learn how to live, not how to earn a living.” She prepared us well, assigning vocabulary drills, research papers, and an essay on “America’s Future is Up to Youth” for a contest sponsored by the Clayton County VFW to which she belonged. She discussed current events in class when the Supreme Court decision, Brown vs. the Board of Education, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the Little Rock Nine desegregation campaign dominated the news. “MRS,” a rightwing Republican columnist for the Clayton County Register condemned the national civil rights movement and called the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and other leaders Communist stooges. Miss Lenth asked: “What do you think?” Most of us rejected the charge that protest made someone a Communist. The United States proclaimed equality of opportunity, individual rights, and freedom of speech and association. Our youthful sense of fair play manifested itself as sympathy for the Negro cause.
Miss Lenth recruited me as a junior for drama and forensics, which arguably were the best programs at Central High. Fall productions of well-known Broadway plays that had been made into movies such as I Remember Mama and Arsenic and Old Lace cast between fourteen and thirty-one students and filled the auditorium to capacity. I played Peter Thorkelson in the former and Dr. Einstein in the latter, roles respectively performed by Edgar Bergen and Peter Lorre in cinema versions. I competed in forensics with an oratorical declamation of a speech entitled “This is It,” warning of problems for a world in which the colored peoples of Africa and Asia outnumbered Whites. The following year, I composed a humorous essay about horror movies for radio speaking. Competition began in late January at the Clayton County Speech Festival. The Iowa High School Speech Association Sectional (early February), District (mid-March), and State events (early April) followed. In February we entered the District Tournament of the High School Forensic League and if judged “Superior” moved on to state finals at the University of Iowa in mid-April. The Chamber of Commerce rightfully acknowledged Miss Lenth’s consistent success “as a maker of champions” at the Central High Awards Assembly in 1959. Even those of us with lesser ability appreciated her skill.
Yearbook publication resumed in 1953 with formation of the Central Consolidated School District. Thirty or more students, nearly 60 percent of them female, comprised the Shadows staff on which I served my junior year. The Tatler had nine editors and a 64 percent female staff of more than forty. Reid Dillon, a favorite social studies teacher and baseball coach, acted as adviser. He decided who would be elected co-editors, including me my senior year. My female partner and I made assignments, edited stories, prepared layouts, proofread, and distributed the final copies of seven issues. She did most of the work and later made Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Iowa.
Many of us often dropped out of one extracurricular activity and tried another. A talented few joined everything while others did nothing or just FFA and FHA. Small high schools offered more opportunities for participation than larger institutions. Many of my peers recalled their multiple endeavors as “a great experience,” providing “a well-rounded outlook.” They developed appreciation for the musical and dramatic arts; gained knowledge about journalism and other fields; acquired skills of cooperation, self-application, and time management; and learned it takes effort and talent to succeed as well as courage and grace to cope with failure despite their best efforts. Ninety badly written column inches for the Tatler qualified me for the mostly female membership of Quill & Scroll. Despite mediocre freshmen and sophomore grades, I wiggled into the National Honor Society as a second semester senior. I also joined twenty or so lettermen in the Warriors Club as a senior, and proudly wore my red cardigan emblazoned with a large white “E.” A gold basketball and football indicated the sports in which I had lettered. White initials of my name and my graduation date numerals were sewn onto my right and left pockets respectively. A white star and two chevrons on my left sleeve indicated that I had been a team captain and had lettered two years. “Willy Warrior” (the Cleveland Indians Chief Wahoo emblem) was proudly displayed on my right sleeve. No one in Elkader regarded it as a racist symbol at the time.
In retrospect, high school extracurricular activities probably benefited me most through trips taken to college campuses and small northeastern Iowa cities. The speech team competed at the University of Iowa where I appeared on the university theatre main stage and spoke in classrooms of Beaux Arts buildings on the Pentacrest. In returning from Grinnell College at night, I witnessed how beautiful Iowa State Teacher College appeared lighted by old-fashioned street lamps. Our basketball squad twice scrimmaged Waverly High School at the Wartburg College Gymnasium over the Christmas holidays and attended three State Boys Basketball Tournament finals at the Des Moines Civic Auditorium.
Commencing to What?
Sunday evening baccalaureate services had usually preceded commencement exercises held two or three days later at the end of May. An afternoon commencement chapel replaced it at our graduation. Forty-one of forty-four class members received diplomas in the gymnasium at 8:00 on Friday evening, May 29, 1959. The following Monday, we attended the Alumni Banquet at Peace UCC Church. Perry Price, a Los Angeles attorney who had graduated in 1917, served as master of ceremonies. Because his father and grandfather had been prominent Elkader attorneys, he attracted a record crowd of nearly two hundred. After Sarah Riordan had been honored for attending forty-four consecutive banquets, Price commented that her attendance and his had been quite good on the average. My father, a 1929 graduate, welcomed our class. In responding, I drew a laugh by expressing the hope that our attendance would be as good on average as that of Mr. Price.
For some, graduation opened to higher education and a future in well-paid professions; for others, it closed off formal schooling and often limited them to lower-wage jobs. Many did not have the grades or desire for college. Their parents may have lacked the means, did not see the point and discouraged academic ambitions, or reared daughters for domestic roles. Thirteen from my class and seventeen from the previous class attended college. The class of 1956 had twenty collegians, an unusually high 44 percent compared to 33 and 29 percent of 1958 and 1959 seniors. Other graduates left Elkader for jobs in small industrial cities like Dubuque, Waterloo, and Cedar Rapids because these paid more than work in a small town. The economic need to get bigger or get out discouraged others from taking over the family farm. Fewer farmers meant fewer Main Street merchants, and limited professional opportunities prevented college-educated offspring from returning to their hometown.
I began considering college as a junior when a friend talked about an engineering career. Lacking requisite mathematical skill, I picked teaching instead. I had observed educators and farmers my entire life. The former suited my bookish nature more than the latter. College selection was easier then than now. Students usually chose a school within one hundred miles. Recruiters made few visits, fewer telephone calls, and modest mailings of admissions material. I spoke with only the Luther and Iowa State Teacher College (ISTC) representatives who came to Elkader. I did not visit either campus. I requested an ISTC catalog and went there because it cost one-third less than Luther. Getting in was easy. ISTC admitted the top half of high school classes with suitable scores on the Iowa College Scholarship and Placement Test ranking them among all Iowa seniors for scholastic aptitude, English composition, reading, and general mathematics. Standardized testing became an increasingly important part of the admissions process. Private Eastern colleges developed the better-known SAT to identify the most-talented students. It measured scholastic aptitudes for verbal reasoning and quantitative skills. In 1960, the Educational Testing Service gave the SAT three times yearly for the more than three hundred colleges that subscribed. Meanwhile, public and midwestern colleges used the ACT for advising and placing students. Higher education came to accept SAT scores as reliable even though high school academic performance indicated probable college success more clearly.
Paying for college posed a bigger challenge. Although Iowa farm income averaged about $5000 annually, our taxable income had been only $2400 in 1958, a recession year. Scholarships were few. Banks did not make higher education loans. Many families were unable or unwilling to take on college debt. Fortunately, costs were relatively low. ISTC and Luther respectively charged $850 and $1200 in 1958-1959 (equivalent to 7600 and 10,900 in 2017 dollars). My fiscally prudent parents fortunately had sufficient savings to make college possible. They loaned me money at 4 percent interest as needed and let me live rent-free at home during summers in exchange for helping with harvesting and other chores. Their loans, my wages from summer and on-campus jobs, and an ISTC tuition scholarship paid my college costs.