Interview with Mrs. Cleo Kelly
April 2, 2003
Interviewed by Neavy Graves
Miss Kelly went to the Lawnes School in the Rushmere area of Isle of Wight County.
My name is Neavy Graves and I’m doing an interview with Miss Cleo Kelly for the Schoolhouse Museum.
Q. Miss Kelly can you tell us what school you attended?
A. I attended school in Rushmere and the name of the school was Lawnes Elementary.
Q. Is this the area that you grew up in?
A. I grew up in the area of Rushmere.
Q. Can you tell me the number of brothers and sisters that you had?
A. I had one sister and four brothers.
Q. Did they attend the same school?
A. Yes.
Q. What grades were taught?
A. Pre-primer through seventh.
Q. How many classrooms?
A. Three.
Q. Can you tell me your teacher’s names?
A. My pre-primer, first and second grade teacher was Miss Coleman, then I went to the third grade and I had, at that time she was Elizabeth Cork but she got married and she became Mrs. Blunt. And, I also had a Mr.Gillis and a Mr. Williams.
Q. Did you attend school there through the seventh grade?
A. Yes. I graduated the seventh grade.
Q. Can you tell me what years you attended the school?
A. 1944 – 1951.
Q. Do you have any information about the history of your school? When it opened, when it closed?
A. No, I don’t have that information.
Q. Is it still standing?
A. Yes, it is.
Q. How did you get to and from school?
A. I walked.
Q. How far?
A. About a mile and a half, roughly.
Q. Did you have any chores to do before school and after school?
A. Not before school. We really didn’t have time. You had to get out of there and be at school before 9:00. But in the evening, when I got home, we had to get wood and chips to make the fire for the next morning and make one in the evening when you got there in case nobody was there that had made one…if the parents weren’t there. Then maybe I would wash dishes and dry dishes.
Q. Did you have any chores to do at school?
A. I used to help with washing the chalkboard in the evening and dusting the erasers and, before we left school, they opened up something like a little small soup kitchen and I used to go in there at lunch time and help out and then I’d get a free lunch. They would serve like beans or soup. Especially during the wintertime.
Q. How did your school day start?
A. With the devotion. We all did the devotion, we would sing whatever the teacher wanted you to sing. We all had to do Bible verses and we pledged allegiance to the flag.
Q. What subjects did you cover?
A. Reading, writing, arithmetic. That’s very vivid in my mind and I’m sure there were other subjects that have left me for right now because they had other classes to teach.
Q. What classes were taught in each room?
A. Pre-primer, first and second grade were all under one teacher, Miss Coleman. Miss Cork or Mrs. Blunt had three, four and five and six and seven, you had Mr. Gillis, well, I did. There were folding doors separating those two rooms. They had folding doors and they separated those two rooms.
Q. Do you remember any specific textbooks or readers that you had?
A. Dick and Jane. That was the basic reader. That’s the only one that’s real vivid in my mind, Dick and Jane. That was the pre-primer book, which is now kindergarten in regular school.
Q. Where were your books kept?
A. If you were lucky and got a seat with a desk up under it, you could push them in there. But, if that desk was not there up underneath it, you would put them on the floor beside your seat that you sat in.
Q. How long was your school day?
A. 9:00 to 3:00 or 3:30.
Q. How long was your lunch period and did you have any recess?
A. I can’t say actually how long, but I always remember the 10:30 recess which was about a half an hour and they had a bell that would ring and everybody would go to the right side of the bell. That was about 30 minutes and then you came back in and then your lunchtime was around 12:00. I can’t recall now just how long the lunch hour was. Then, you went outside again at 2:00 for 15 minutes for recess. And by 3:30 you were ready to go and you always had to sing, “Now the day is over, night is growing nigh, shadows of the evening pass across the sky, Amen.” That was sung everyday before you left school.
Q. Where did you eat your lunch?
A. In the classroom, at my desk.
Q. You said that later on you had a soup kitchen.
A. They ran a little soup kitchen off of the room that was off of the first and second grade room. They had a little kitchen in there and they were able to serve hot soup, especially during the winter months and you would get like a bowl of soup or a bowl of beans and if you worked in the kitchen, the older girls would go in and help serve the soup, then you would get a free bowl of soup.
Q. Do you remember how much the soup cost?
A. If I’m not mistaken, it might have been about 25 cents and had bread. We had vending trucks that would come to the school. I recall very vividly the last name of the company was Smith[?] and the bread man would come and bring bread which you had with the soup and the teachers sort of prepared it in big pots, they prepared it and they would get older students to help out.
Q. What did you do during recess?
A. We would play games, Ring Around the Roses, shoot marbles, and hopscotch and do different things like that. The boys always played ball.
Q. How would you describe your school’s classrooms?
A. Crowded because two of the rooms had three grades. When you got through the fifth grade, that was sort of an honor because you just had the sixth and seventh grade.
Q. Were these large rooms?
A. Not that large but they held the students. It was full.
Q. Did you have blackboards?
A. Yes.
Q. Anything else on the wall?
A. Once in a while the teachers made us put up something but we really didn’t have any supplies. No more that what the teacher would bring and put up herself or you would do class projects and maybe paste that up or something like that. But we really didn’t have what you would call basic teaching aids that would go up. Maybe A, B, C.’s, I remember that. All the classrooms had that and a numbers chart, but basically that was it.
Q. How was the school heated in the winter?
A. Each one had a potbelly coal heater. And the boys would come and go out and gather up trash and sticks and come back and make the fire. And we had a coal bin of wood shed. The county would buy a ton of coal and send up there to the school system and each of us had a coal stove and a shovel and that’s how the rooms were heated.
Q. What type of restrooms did you have?
A. Outdoors. The boys had a room…a bathroom and the girls.
Q. What type of water supply did you have?
A. Well, we had a shallow well that ran dry and it was served by a pump and you had to prime it. But, when the well went dry, you didn’t have nothing to prime it with and there was a lady that lived across the field, by the name of Miss Anna Wells who had to bring her own water from across the road from Miss Betsy King, and, she would let us come over and get water and we had mayonnaise jars to put your water in _________________________________________ and then, Miss Anna, bless her heart would have two buckets of water, because she said the children need to have water and, eventually, the county dug another well and they put an outdoor faucet out there and sometimes, if you didn’t go to her house, you would go across the road to Miss Penn’s [?]. She had well water and she had a spigot on her back porch and she would let you come and fill up your jar.
Q. How would you describe your teacher’s desk?
A. Well, nothing really exciting about it. It looked like a desk. Nothing really unusual, just a teacher’s desk.
Q. Was it homemade?
A. I don’t know because when I got to school, the desk was just there. But they were old, they had been there a long time.
Q. What type desks did the students have?
A. We had old, dingy desks that needed repair. Some of them had the little board on the bottom, so you could put your books and your lunch, some didn’t. When I got to sixth grade, we had the long seats that two people could sit in the same seat and share the long desk. All our furniture was old, we never had anything new, and everything was hand-me-downs, even my books.
Q. What school supplies were used?
A. Well, whatever your parents bought you. They knew that you needed that for you classroom. The parents bought everything, your papers, your pencils, any school supplies you needed, your parents bought.
Q. What was the lighting like in the classroom?
A. We had electric __________ and every light had a long cord from the ceiling and it had a light bulb in it.
Q. Did you have shades on the windows?
A. Yes, we had shades on the windows.
Q. Did you have a coatroom?
A. Yes, everybody had a coatroom and you would go in and put your coat in the coatroom. Each room had a separate coatroom and the teacher had a separate closet where she could put her personal things.
Q. This coatroom, did it have hooks or nails on the wall?
A. I think they were hooks. They were either hooks or nails. You didn’t have a clothes rack to hang them. Everybody just put coats on the coat hooks.
Q. Describe what discipline and punishment was like?
A. Well, a lot of times we had to go in the closet and the coat room had an opening at the bottom, so therefore, you were not completely in the dark and a lot of children would crawl out from under there. Sometimes, if it was extreme punishment, you went in the teacher’s closet and she would have to leave the door cracked…and, licked in the hand with 12-inch rulers, then you went home with a note and the final punishment came when you got home.
Q. Are there any additional school experiences you would like to tell us about?
A. I always looked forward to different plays we had. They always had plays and I was always asked to take part in the plays. We always had school graduations and school closing plays. We had a play one year where we would go down to Gravel Hill Church. And go down there to rehearse because we would have the play at the church…and it was just different things they used to have out there at night. They had what they called basket parties to raise funds for different things and they were very enjoyable. But, I always looked forward to the plays, maybe that was because I was in all of them.
Q. Did you have anything for graduation?
A. Yes, we had a play…the first thing was a play. I was always in the play. Then, you had to go in another room and change and get in your white dress for graduation. And, that was an exciting time, all the girls getting into their white dresses for graduation after the play.
Q. Did you ever celebrate May Day?
A. No, I don’t think we celebrated May Day. Now, I can remember, my sister Janie, she used to take me to Isle of Wight Training to May Day affairs, but I don’t recall a May Day out there.
Q. Are there any other childhood memories you can recall that you would like to tell us about?
A. Well, in my early childhood, I was reading at the pre-primer books before I started to school because my brothers had the pre-primer books. I completed the second and third grade in one school term and I can remember, very vividly, that my Daddy would make me sit on the floor beside his chair at Sunday School on Sunday. He was superintendent and I didn’t act quite like he thought I should, so he set me on the floor by his chair.
Q. After attending school, what jobs, changes or other experiences do you recall in the county?
A. One was the construction of Hardy Elementary School, which closed down Lawnes. I have no idea what year that took place. I had some nieces and nephews and even my own daughter attended Hardy Elementary School. Then before that, we had something called the Freedom of Choice Plan and I enrolled my daughter her first year at the Smithfield Elementary School and integration hadn’t taken place, and they gave them freedom of choice and then they had total integration of students and faculty. Opportunities for Blacks became reality. Henry Bradby, my first cousin, was the first Black elected to the Board of Supervisors in the Hardy District in Isle of Wight County. I had the opportunity to be a part of helping him win the election. I also had to opportunity to work on the election returns one year at the courthouse.
Q. Can you give us a short autobiographical sketch of the highlights of your life?
A. Well, I would say, good days, bad days, that kind of sums it all up. My good days still outweigh my bad days and I just thank God be the Glory.
Q. Is there any advice you would like to give the school children of today?
A. Stay in school, obey the teacher, even though you may not agree with them. I didn’t always agree either, but they have been put there to educate us and then know what they are doing even if you may think different. Stay obedient and sacrifice and stay in school, do you best and try to go on to colleges and universities of higher learning because this is going to come back and haunt you in the long run in the job market. Try to excel and do the very best that you can and even after you go out and start looking for a job, it may not be what you majored in but you have to start somewhere and the whole thing is to go. You have to crawl before you can walk. And, even if the job is not what you majored in, you take that job and wait until an opportunity becomes available. And don’t ask for a handout, but just say, “Give me a chance,” and ask for a hand and will succeed. And, of course, above all, don’t leave it all to your own understanding, just trust in the Lord and then He will guide you up the path.
Q. Anything else you would like to add?
A. Well, that’s about all. I have enjoyed the interview. I have been very excited about it and I was talking about it and how I just couldn’t wait for the day to come. And, I think it was a very good idea to do this, because you have the young people now that really don’t know, same as my own daughter, what we went through to get the education that our parents could afford. We did not have the opportunities that these children have now such as grants and student loans. We did not have that when we came out of school. If you went to school your parents had to foot that bill and pay for your education because those things were just not available. We walked to school, until I got to the seventh grade and the school bus came, but it did not come down my road. I still walked. I told them I walked for 12 years. But, that did not stop us. Rain, snow, sleet, and no the weather did not stop you. You went to school and there were not that many cars available to transport you back and forth, so you walked. You had no choice, but there was no such thing that you didn’t go to school because it was raining. They put galoshes on you or raincoats, or whatever they had. But, we made it and we had a good time. I enjoyed my years at Lawnes School. With all of the outdoor things that we had, back then, we just enjoyed it.
All these kids in one room, they’ll learn, they never failed. And, I learned my A,B,C’s. And, then they had no aids such as alphabets having a sound, I didn’t know anything about that but I learned my A,B,C’s. Of course, everything is new and times change and change is OK as long as it’s change for the better. And, education is very, very important. And, that is what I would tell all young people, please stay in school, it will pay off.
Q. Mrs. Kelly, we appreciate this interview with you for the Schoolhouse Museum and we hope that one day, your grandkids and your great grandkids can go to the museum and listen to you tell your story. Thank you very much.
A. And thank you and I’ve enjoyed our talk.