RANDOM MEMORIES FROM SIXTY YEARS
AGO
MARION HIGH SCHOOL
CLASS OF 1947
By Harold Ratzburg
Way back in the fall of 1942, I was a shy
little ole farm kid, walking into the "big city" school in
Marion. I, like a lot of other kids that day, was fresh off the
farm, having graduated from Maple Valley Grade School, way out in the Town of
Dupont.
My only experience in the big city was
when I came with my folks to do shopping in town, usually on Saturday night
on "Market Day".
I
got a little more experience in town when I went to religious training at
St. John's Lutheran Church under the guidance of Reverend Olrogge, a real
preacher type preacher, who could really preach a fire and brimstone sermon
from his pulpit. After our weekly religious training class was over,
I would walk down town to the soda fountain at Mee's Drug store. Each
week my Ma would give me a quarter to blow in town, and that 25 cents would buy
a chocolate malted milk and a Walt Disney, Donald Duck or Micky Mouse
or Superman comic book.
Clarence Mees made the best darned malted
milk in the world!! (my opinion of course)
I don't know
what happened to the ice cream industry since those days, because I don't think
that they make malted milks anymore----just plain ordinary milkshakes. It
pains me that I haven't found a malted milk in years.
Anyway,
Mees' drug store is where my parents would pick me up and bring me home.
Walking into MHS where I knew very few of
the other kids was a little awe inspirering.
I found my way
to the "Cloak Room"---maybe it was called the Coat Room---and claimed
a coat hook in the simple square room. The school didn't have
lockers, just the room with the hooks, and that hook pretty much remained your
hook for the rest of the year.
As I remember, most of the time while in
Maple Valley grade school, I wore the very practical---for farm kids----the
good old bib overalls. When we did get into town, I was always impressed
by the city kids because they wore the classy pants that required a belt to
hold them up and you could tuck your shirt inside the belt and not look
like some "dork" kid off the farm, but I think by the time I got to
high school I had graduated to the belted pants.
I'll
be darned if I can remember how I got to high school every day. Brother
Lyle tells me that he remembers that some neighbor up the road picked us up and
took us to town and back on school days. At some point, I suppose that
after I got my drivers license----at sixteen I think----that I drove the family
car back and forth and traded rides with other farm kids. School buses
came to town well after I graduated.
I do remember that Dwaine Dieck, from the
other side of town, did have his own car that he used to get to school.
It was a big old limousine type car, with wooden spoked wheels and
I envied him a lot. Take a look at the photo attached to
this article and you will see what I mean.
Most of our studying was done in the
"Main Room", which was a big room with a stage to put on school plays
and for all us students to meet for general meetings and announcements.
As I remember, that is where we were assigned desks in which we could keep our
books and not have to lug them around all day, and remember, back packs had not
yet been designed for the general population like they wear these
days. There was always a teacher assigned to monitor us students, but we
still got away with passing notes and clandestine whispered conversations.
The
Agriculture Building was a separate building to the south of the main
building. It was set up to teach us about milk separation and testing,
carpentry, animal husbandry, and all the other things that us FFA (Future
Farmers of America) kids needed to study. One of my favorite classes
through the years was 'woodworking' in which I built a three legged milking
stool to be used at home to get under those damned cows to do the milking.
Sports, back then, as now was a big
thing. The best players that made the sports teams were the elite
students in high school crowd---i.e.---the big men on campus. My own
sports career was a short one. Dad needed the help at home for doing the
evening chores, so for the first three years, I didn't have the time to try out
for anything. In my senior year, Dad let up a little, and I was able to
go out for football.
I
was a pretty good sized guy, one of the biggest in the class, so guess
what? I made first string the first year I tried out for the
football team.
I had one big problem however----I was
not as aggressive as I should have been. Even in a game, after I tackled
a guy and he still kicked me in the face, I didn't get mad. I guess I was
just a lover, not a fighter, and I didn't go after him when I later had a
chance. I figured that getting kicked in the face was just part of the
game.
"Buck" Hintz (Reinhard) was a lot
more aggressive, and he was the guy that Coach Grasser went to when the Coach
needed a guy to pick on a guy in the other team to get him ticked off and make
a mistake. Bucky was just the guy to do it.
The most memorable game that I played in
that year, was against our arch rival ---Clintonville----in the first game of
the season. What made it memorable was that they kicked our butt to the
tune of sixty to nothing----60 to 0!!!! I couldn't wait for that game to
end and put us out of our misery. The Marion Pigeons could do nothing
right that day, and of course, having such an aggressive name as "the
Pigions" didn't help us strike fear in the hearts of our opponents.
I was happy when many later years I heard that the name had been
changed to "the Mustangs".
Buss's Sweet shop----or was it Buss's
Soda Shop----was a big part of our high school culture back in the
1940's. It was located a few doors south of Mee's Drug store and
that is where a lot of the kids headed at lunch time. He served up milk
shakes and malted milks (not as good as Mee's) and hamburgers and all the
usual fast food stuff that High School kids like
Mr.
Buss was tolerant of us kids and he was fair in his dealings. In the
1940's, World War Two was in full swing and there were shortages in everything,
including Hershey Chocolate bars. They cost a whole nickel back
then, and Mr Buss, when he was able to obtain a box of the Hershey bars, would
ration them out so you could only buy one bar at a time to each kid that had
the money to buy them. You can't get more fair than that, can you?
The Photography club was a lot of
fun. Mr Anderson, the Science teacher, showed us how to develop film in
the dark room and arranged for me to use the school camera to take photos of
school activities like the Football Bonfire celebration and other
affairs. All cameras back in those days used black and white film with
eight photos on each roll. Photos were kind of expensive considering the
income of people in those days, so we had to ration our picture taking.
That meant that the number of pictures to look back on in our albums today
after 60 years is very limited in comparison with the number of digital photos
that are taken every day today. Almost every kid has a cell
phone with a built in camera and photos are taken by the thousands
every day. It makes me think that sixty years from now when people look
for photos of their old school days, they will find so many of them that
it might scare them off from the research, IF-- they can find them in all their
computer files and CD disks.
One last memory of high school days in
this story is one of disappointment. Being a farm kid meant that
every day I was needed to help milk those damned cows at home, and since the
Scouts met once a week at 7 PM in town, my family just couldn't arrange for
transportation to get me there. To compensate, I managed to get a copy of
the Boy Scout Handbook that every Scout carried and I studied that on my
own. With the manual, I learned how to tie rope knots, build fires,
first aid, and all the other neat things that a scout was supposed to learn. It
did help to ease my disappointment and that was the best I could do, but there
were no merit badges that I could earn. Damn those cows.
So Folks, that wraps up my Marion High
School memores, the ones off the top of my head. As I look through the
old copies of our Mario Year Book and read the comments of old friends that
signed it, I realize that more memories come forward that could fill all the
pages of the Marion Advertiser.
So I better stop so that Dan has room
to put in some paying ads that keep the paper in operation.
copyright Harold Ratzburg, 2012
