A Texas Education for a future in California

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(Editor’s Note: This is the first of two installments. The conclusion appeared in the Dec. 20th edition of the Inquirer. For the conclusion click here.)

My education got a late start when my mother enrolled me in the Dilworth School in September 1945. The following October I turned 7. There were 30 students in grades one through six, taught by one teacher, a new and inexperienced 19-year-old, very pretty Williemae Mikulencak. Her boyfriend, Howard Stulting, would sometimes drop Miss Mikulencak off in front of the school. Their kissing goodbye was of great interest to the student body.

I already knew my ABCs, and I was able to read the first-grade material. Mama spent many hours reading to me. Will James’ 1926 Smoky the Cow Horse was my favorite book. Aunt Dicey, a Houston first grade teacher, would visit in the summertime. She would bring me all the back issues of the incredible Norman Rockwell covered Saturday Evening Post.

The Dilworth School

An 1883 substantial brick building included a small auditorium, four classrooms, a library, and various storage closets. There were incredibly stinky brick outdoor toilets for boys and girls. Each classroom had a wood-burning potbelly stove. In the wintertime one or two of the older boys were appointed to bring in donated wood and start a fire in the stove. Water was piped to the school from a water tank filled by a windmill atop an open-water well across the road from the school. The school site included more than two acres with several trees. The building had electricity.

There had been what everyone referred to as a “Teacherage.” It had a basement, and that was all that was left after it burned. In the past Dilworth heyday, when the school had four teachers, the “always-single” teachers and principal lived in the Teacherage. Without a Teacherage, Miss Mikulencak rented a room from Miss Emma Wenski, a few yards down the gravel road from the school.

Fourth-grader Evelyn Velek rode a horse to school. At school she unsaddled the horse, took the bridle off, put a rope around the horse’s neck, and tied the rope to a large log. The log was too large for the horse to drag very far, but small enough to allow moving to new grazing patches. At the end of the day Evelyn did the reverse and rode the three or four miles home. Rain or shine, sleet or snow, Evelyn never missed school.

Albert Trobl

Albert and I would become best friends. Albert lived down County Road 357 from our hilltop house, but we had not met until the first grade. After that first day I waited for Albert at the gate to my lane to walk to school. Very soon, probably during the first week, Albert asked me if I smoked, and with a flourish he pulled a bag of Bull Durham tobacco out of his overalls pocket and began rolling a cigarette. Once it was rolled, he lit it and took a big drag, exhaling up in the air to demonstrate his smoking expertise. That day I declined to join Albert, but in the days to come I was rolling and smoking. The first time I tried it I gagged and hacked while Albert laughed but by the end of the first grade, at 7 years of age, I was an expert cigarette roller and had learned to blow smoke rings.

Albert’s father and older brother Eugene smoked; therefore, there was a ready supply of Bull Durham and Bugler tobacco that we stashed alongside the road. I tried Days Work chewing tobacco but that made me sick. I gave it up, sticking to smoking, ignoring Mama and Grandma’s warnings that smoking would stunt my growth. Warnings not to swim in the cattle watering tanks were also ignored. On most summertime Sunday afternoons, Albert and I swam with the frogs, snakes, and turtles in one of the local cattle watering tanks. The shallow areas would be covered with green algae which, if I swam through it, would collect above my upper lip. Mama would know I had been swimming when she saw the green line.

Albert’s parents were Czechoslovakian immigrants. His father, a big hulking man, spoke broken English, while his mother spoke only Czech. She baked wonderful kolaches in a kerosene stove that made the whole house smell like kerosene. Kerosene stoves sometimes blew-up, often killing or badly burning their users.

Ogeston’s country store

Across the road from the Dilworth School in a barn-like corrugated tin-covered building that was once a dance hall, David Ogeston ran a country store. Directly inside the front door a long counter supported a massive ancient National Cash Register which sitting on top of a drawer of cubbyholes storing receipts for credit customers. He had a candy case supplied with, among other unremarkable candies, Three Musketeers, Baby Ruths, and Double Bubble Gum. He had Oreos, Post Toasties, and Quaker Oats sold in a round cardboard box still in use today, hard cookies by the barrel, summer sausage, and Saltine crackers, as well as various staples such as sugar, coffee, salt, Butter Crust sliced “light” bread, and sometimes big rounds of cheese.

Outside, at the front of the store, Mr. Ogeston had a hand-operated gasoline pump that had a glass bowl at the top with marks for gallons up to 10. If a customer wanted five gallons, the bowl would be filled to the five-gallon mark by moving a three-foot-long pump handle back and forth. Gravity drained the gasoline from the glass bowl into the customer’s vehicle.

For Albert and me, Ogeston’s was the place to go every day, either at lunch recess, or after school. We would get a five-cent Big Red soda water and a box of Oreo cookies, or Double Bubble gum to chew while we smoked our afternoon on-the-way-home cigarette.

The garlic priest

The Dilworth community supported a Catholic church, a small white clapboard building with a distinguishing steeple. Mass was said on Sunday morning by a Czechoslovakian priest who reeked of garlic. The church was part of the Shiner, Texas, diocese, and the “garlic priest” traveled a circuit of churches for Sunday services. He also taught catechism on the Dilworth School playground on Thursday after school.

The garlic priest drove a Model-A Ford. On the days he came for catechism instruction he offered those kids who lived on the road back to Shiner a ride home. I was part of that group, but I never accepted. The priest’s mysterious clothing and strong odor, as well as his peculiar accent scared me.

A bus to Gonzales

By 1948 a great migration from small farms to the cities was in full swing. Country schools were closing all across America. Declining enrollments and the difficulty of getting teachers to work in run-down facilities for low pay was a contributing factor. By now with only 12 to 15 students, from the first to the sixth grade, taught by a controversial teacher (Miss Mikulencak had married Howard Stulting and moved to Alaska), the Dilworth School closed at the end of the 1947-48 school year, my third-grade year.

In early September, I climbed aboard a yellow 1941 GMC Wayne-built coach school bus on my way to Gonzales and Central Ward Elementary School, about 10 miles distant as the crow flies from Dilworth, but more than a 20 mile bus ride. I was in the fourth grade and the second passenger that first morning. Evelyn Velek was the first—Albert Trobl would have been first, but he and his family had moved to Matagorda that summer. I would never see him again.

I remained the second passenger on that bus route (with a very short break in early 1951) for the next six and one-half years. Meandering around the countryside, picking up Billy Chennault, Kenneth Kiefer, and Kenneth Nelms, who lived in the historic Braches house on Peach Creek. Mildred Roznosky and Evelyn Kremling lived alongside a bad dirt road going east of Dilworth, and Barbara Jo and Nancy Kay Brothers lived down a 3-4 mile gravel road to the Kokernot ranch, near the Guadalupe River. Driving the bus route took more than an hour most days and in the winter I boarded in the dark and got off in the dark. Glenn Shanklin, my bus driver and the school district’s bus maintenance mechanic, greeted me that first day and bid me farewell on my last ride home in January 1955.

From near the Dilworth School to U.S. Highway 90A, about four miles, the road was not paved. Neither was it covered with gravel for all-weather passage. When it rained, and the road to my house would be impassable, Mr. Shanklin reversed the bus route, stopping at the closed Dilworth School. On those days Tom (my step-father) saddled up Sparky and took me to catch the bus there. The great 1950 snowstorm stopped everything for three or four days.

The new 795 Farm-to-Market paved road ended just northwest of Dilworth, and by 1952 the county graveled the road from Dilworth to 90A for “all weather” use. Nevertheless, heavy rain caused flooding and halted Mr. Shanklin at Peach Creek.

It was a cold ride in winter. The bus had a small passenger automobile-type radiator water heater mounted on the firewall next to the driver’s feet that could not possibly heat the bus cabin. On cold days I wore two pair of socks and long johns.

Central Ward School

For the first few days of the fourth grade I was in a state of amazement. Central Ward School had steam heat, in-door flush toilets, and an organized playground. Winson (not Winston) Hester taught me how to flip over backwards from the chinning bar. Johnny Zavadil and I shared a homeroom, as well as art and music class. Miss Robertson showed us how to finger-paint. We learned the words to the “Star Spangled Banner”, and (grudgingly) how to square dance in Mrs. Frehner’s music class. Girls and boys were segregated on the playground.

Friday was an exciting day. For a quarter, the new Central Ward Cafeteria served hamburgers with Fritos. A half pint of milk cost another nickel.

Bus turns over

 The 1951 seventh grade brought a new bus driver, who drove a short wheel base Wayne-built coach 1946 International school bus over a new route covering the Kokernot community that was in the Shiner School District. Very odd. Mr. Hill drove like a bat out of hell picking up a dozen or more Shiner students and delivering them to the Kokernot Store where they transferred to a Shiner bus.

Mr. Hill took the bus to his nearby home at night, not back to Gonzales, and late one afternoon, after I had gotten off, he overturned the bus. By some stroke of luck, neither he nor his two children (the only passengers still aboard) were injured. That was the end of his bus-driving career however. Mr. Shanklin, driving the same 1941 GMC as before, took over the old route.

The seventh grade was also an education disaster. For our English class, Mrs. Reese had us read and discuss Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” all year. Even worse, the Gonzales school system paid special attention to Texas history using a very prejudiced comic book produced by Mobil oil.

High School

Thankfully, having passed eighth grade sentence diagramming, I was now in Mr. Muenzler’s biology class cutting open a live frog (anesthetized of course) to see the heart beat. Interestingly, Mr. Muenzler had coral, moccasin and rattlesnakes preserved in large bottles of formaldehyde.

Earl Gerloff, James Minear and I took Spanish. We thought Spanish would be a snap. We knew all of the Spanish expletives. But what a surprise: Mrs. Little required Spanish (proper Castilian Spanish) spoken in class and therefore, most of us, including many of the Spanish speakers who spoke a sort-of “Spanglish” were lost. I remember “Que es el burro muy importante?” but not much else. Mrs. Little took no prisoners. She gave the three of us the boot. Her husband Omar was the Apache football team coach.

Coach Little’s football team won the District 24AA Championship and played the Cameron District 23AA Champion Yeoman team. For the big Friday night game, a group of local football fans chartered a train to haul the school band, drill squads, and more than 500 fans the 90 miles to Cameron. James Minear and I made the epic trip—neither of us had ever ridden a train. The Apaches lost.

The Southern Pacific’s 11-coach special train, that included a dining car, was pulled by a steam engine. The Inquirer reported the round trip tickets cost $3.68.

Gonzales High School offered woodshop in 1954. It was taught in the recently closed “Mexican” school as a result of Brown v. Board of Education. Each day, Mr. Gotwald picked up each woodshop class at Central Ward and drove the students across town to the abandoned school in a bus. There were a few hand tools—hammers, saws, and a framing square, but no power tools.

There were some exciting events, nonetheless. Sitting in the back of the classroom one afternoon, Robert Ramos and Pete Rodriguez were calling each other names in Spanish. Mr. Gotwald, after asking them to be quiet several times, told them to go outside. Immediately, we could hear the ensuing fistfight and after a few minutes of this, one of the older boys was dispatched outside, to break up the fight and bring Ramos and Rodriguez back into the classroom. Both had bloody noses.

Fred Havel, a new young high school science teacher, helped me build a crystal set radio and showed me how to make windings for a model electric motor. I strung an antenna across the top of the Dilworth house to gather radio signals for my radio. Grandma was afraid I would be electrocuted.

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