Ref: Hearthstone Town and Country Pennsburg, Montgomery County, PA Thursday - April 10, 2003 WARNER'S SCHOOL HOUSE The Littlest Red School House Upper Hanover Township 1856-1948 PART 4 OF 5 Editor's note: This is the fourth installment of a five-part story on the history of Warner's School House written by a great-great-grandson of the farmer whom the school house was named. Next week we will publish the final portion of the school's history in this section of the paper. Poetry Recitals - In early 1926, Warner's fourth-grader Grace MILLER entered the Upper Hanover School District declamation contest, a poetry recital. She won for her dramatic presentation. Her poem was Eugene FIELD's "The Duel," which begins, "The gingham dog and the calico cat side by side on the table sat." Weeks later, someone else won the regional contest at Ursinus College, where Grace discovered most of her competitors were reciting the same poem. At his June 9, 1927, graduation ceremony at Palm Schwenkfelder Church, eighth-grader LeRoy SCHOENLY recited from memory a four-page poetic essay. The wistful essay, written for LeRoy by Mr. DOTTERER was on "the hope and promise of a new spring and a new life." In late 1927, student Foster SCHULTZ corrected his teacher Helen BROWNING's pronunciation of Yosemite. She called it Yosemight. She didn't appreciate the challenge. Tongue Frozen To Pump - In winter of early 1929, second-grader William SCHULTZ licked the iron handle of the frigid water pump outside the school and his tongue froze to the handle. After a struggle, he pulled his tongue free. It hurt, but he healed. Angela Nutter - In fall 1929, Angela NUTTER became the first and only black pupil ever to enroll at Warner's School. Black children were so rare in Pennsylvania Dutch country that on the night before the school year began, fourth-grader Vera WASSER's father, Jonathan, sat down with her and had a talk about open-mindedness. "Now, Vera," he said, "there's going to be a little girl at school tomorrow, and her skin is going to be a little darker than yours. But remember, you are no better than she, and she is no better than you. Just treat her like everybody else." Perhaps the other students had similar guidance, or perhaps these children hadn't been exposed to the foolish ideas that might have spoiled their natural friendliness. For more than a year, until she moved away from ..... Horse Through Snow - In a fierce snowstorm in early 1934, Frank ROMAN took his younger sister Thomasella into Warner's School on a farm horse. "Tommy" was in sixth grade and Frank already was out of school. They rode more than a half mile from Kraussdale Road through deep drifts and blinding snow. At the school house door, they found Mr. BITTING. "No school today!" he shouted. On a typical school day, pupils would walk or bicycle to Warner's School House from as far as a mile away. The teacher would start the morning by ringing the school bell. Once the pupils were seated, the teacher would lead the class in the Pledge of Allegiance and the Lord's Prayer. The teacher also would read from the Bible's Book of Psalms. Then the teacher would call one grade at a time to the school room's front seats, starting with the first-graders. The teacher would go over the pupils' lessons, give them classwork to complete at their desks or at the blackboard, and then call the next highest grade to the front, moving up through the eighth grade. Most often, there were only three, four or five pupils in each grade. Class would be interrupted by morning and afternoon recess, and by the noon "dinner" break. The teacher would call the students back by ringing the school bell, or by giving that honor to one of the pupils. At recess, the children might play Ball-E-Over or Kick the Wicky. Ball-E-Over - In Ball-E-Over, one group of pupils would yell "Ball-E-Over" and someone in a group on the other side of the school would throw a ball over the roof. Whoever caught the ball would run to the other side, and if he hit someone with the ball, the hit player would join his former opponents, and so on, until one team disappeared. Kick the Wicky was like baseball, except that the players substituted a "wicky," a section of bicycle tire 12 to 18 inches long, for the ball. The wicky would be set up across two spaced bricks. Then a player would kick the wicky off the bricks, run the bases and try to score as the other team fielded the wicky. In spring 1934, John and Elizabeth NOVOMESKY moved from New York City to the Old WASSER farm near Warner's School House with their son, John Jr., who was finishing fourth grade. They had immigrated to New York from Slovakia in 1929, when John Jr. was 4 years old. (Sixty-nine years later, John Jr. still would remember coming into New York Harbor on the boat: "People all of a sudden were saying, 'Socha Slobody! Socha Slobody!' I didn't know it, but Socha Slobody in Slovak is Statue of Liberty. And there she was, one of the great sights of my life.") Miss Schwenk and the Flag - In September 1934, as 21-year-old Mabel SCHWENK started her first year as a teacher, she found a grimy American flag, coated with coal soot, tacked up on the front wall of the Warner's classroom. Appalled, she climbed up on the organ, took down the flag and drove it home to Red Hill in her Model T Ford. She washed the flag and hung it on her clothesline to dry in the late summer breeze. The next day, she brought back the Stars and Stripes and hung it back up, neat and clean. Miss SCHWENK placed a box of petunias at the back of the room, on a sunny window sill facing the road. She set up a little library of books, many of them financed by a bake sale, on a rear bookshelf. Under the classroom clock, she put up a sign: "Time Passes. Will You?" The Whistler - In her first days at the school, Miss SCHWENK also met her first young troublemaker. "I had the whole class sing a song together," Mabel (SCHWENK) SWARTLEY recalled 64 years later. "And while we were singing, one boy was whistling. "The other children seemed to freeze. You could see the fear on their faces because they didn't know what I was going to do. Suddenly, it came to me. I said, 'Let's all whistle!' You should have seen the smiles on their faces. I was surprised how many could whistle." The first whistler was Arthur KEYES. Arthur was full of mischief, but he would reform his ways. Years later, he would marry, become a Grehound bus driver and have two daughters, one a school librarian, the other a school teacher. Miss SCHWENK was paid $90 a month at the beginning of the 1934-35 school year, $100 monthly by the end of the term. She would teach at Warner's for three years. By this time, the classroom had the picture of George Washington on one side, a picture of Abraham Lincoln on the other. In 1935, student Esther MILLER was working at the blackboard when she accidentally leaned into the hot stove, burning her left elbow. In 1936, eighth-grader Arthur MACK formally debated the issues of the day as part of his classroom debate teams. Thirty-three years later, Arthur would be elected mayor of Coopersburg. Picture - Lydia (SCHMIDT) MILLER, was the last teacher at Warner's School House. She lived at the former WARNER farm, now the MILLER farm. Mrs. MILLER taught at the little red school house 1920-1922 and 1944-1948. Picture - On January 17, 1980 fire struck the old school house which was being used as a residence by Dorothy DUKA at the time of the fire. The building was repaired and continues to serve as a residence.