Ionia-Eaton-Barry County MI Archives News.....SCHOOLING AT SEBEWA CENTER December 1981
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THE SEBEWA RECOLLECTOR, Bulletin Of The Sebewa Association; Volume 17, December 1981, Number 3.  Submitted With Written Permission Of Grayden D. Slowins, Editor: December 1981
THE SEBEWA RECOLLECTOR, Bulletin of The Sebewa Association; Volume 17, December 
1981, Number 3.  Submitted with written permission of Grayden D. Slowins, 
Editor:

SCHOOLING AT SEBEWA CENTER   By Zack York

“The other day I ran across that old poem of John Greenleaf Whittier’s which 
begins “Still sits the schoolhouse by the road, a ragged begger sleeping”.  As 
I read the rest of his nostalgic and sentimental poem it brought back to me 
memories of my early school days in a country one-room school.  Many times 
during my sixty odd years spent off and on in a classroom as a scholar, teacher 
and administrator, I have been grateful that I was born and lived my childhood 
years on a farm.  (“When I was young, people in my neighborhood often referred 
to the pupils as “scholars” when they spoke of them in the context of academia).

I didn’t know it then, but those were years of transition and change.  The 
machine age was upon us and the world was growing smaller.  I have been proud 
to remind my sophisticated friends and educated colleagues that I am a farm boy 
and glad to have milked cows by hand, slopped the hogs and taken part in all 
the things that one does with a team of horses on a small farm.

Life on the farm revolved around the family, the church and the school.  I 
began my formal schooling in the Sebewa Center School, District #4.  My first 
teacher was Lydia Watkins.  (She was of the OLD school and very strict).  Next 
came Mamie Williams.  (She taught only one year and then married Homer 
Downing).  The next year, because Wilma Hunt (Coe) wasn’t old enough to qualify 
as a teacher when school started, Kate Howland (Strong) taught for a month.  
She had taught in town (Sunfield) and brought with her a recognizable urban 
sophistication, awesome to country kids.  Miss Hunt read to us for “opening 
exercises” and when we misbehaved she had only to threaten not to read to us to 
bring us “to time”.  My last teacher was Mary McCormack.  She was easygoing, a 
reader of the LADIES HOME JOURNAL while the eighth grade conducted the classes 
and was my introduction to the “child centered”, “open classroom” without 
a “strong guiding hand”.

Although the belfry is now gone with the tornado of 1967 along with the boys 
and girls toilets; although the building has had a few changes such as the 
lowered ceiling and the windows bricked up on the east side in efforts to be 
a “standard school”; and although the old jacketed stove was replaced by a 
forced air oil burning furnace and inside toilets have replaced the privies---
in spite of all these noticeable changes, the main building of warm yellow and 
pink bricks remains and the two doors in the south open into the same narrow, 
dark hall with the center door opening in turn into the one room where I went 
to school.  The room is bare of regimented rows of desks and there is no 
recitation seat screwed to the floor on the platform at the far end of the room.

I have only to pause to hear the “ping” of the classroom bell and the teacher’s 
voice commanding, “Turn, rise, pass.”  I can see me do just that---turn in my 
seat with the tilt-top desk; rise and go to the rear of the room; turn right 
and proceed down the west side aisle to the front of the room; turn right again 
and march to the recitation seat; turn front and upon command “Be seated” do 
just that.  Upon completion of the recitation period, Teacher said “rise, turn, 
pass” and we returned to our seats by the outside aisle on the other side of 
the room to the back of the room and subsequently to our seats.

As most pupils, I can’t remember being taught anything.  (I think I knew how to 
read when I started school); rather I learned by osmosis from listening to the 
older kids when they were in recitation.  The only books we had to read, other 
than our textbooks, were a motley collection of old books in the “library”---a 
bookcase with two doors and five shelves of dog eared volumes, the most 
interesting and exciting of which to me were:  Black Beauty, Greek Myths and 
Legends, and The Rover Boys.

Discipline was the order of the day and in my early years, fear of the teacher 
was a strong motivating force.  I was scared of Lydia Watkins.  Big kids told 
tales of the teacher using a rubber hose, a switch, even a ruler to impress 
upon the scholars that sass and unruly behaviour would not be tolerated.  I 
loved school and I don’t remember many traumatic experiences involving corporal 
punishment.  I do remember hearing Iril Shilton, our neighbor, say that his 
dad, Old Andrew Shilton, told his kids that if they “got a lickin’ at school, 
they’d get another when they got home”.  I remember thinking that was pretty 
unjust.  Having suffered once at the hands of the teacher, why should one get 
another thrashing at home?

Recess was not “supervised play”.  We just played:  pom pom pull away, 
prisoner’s base (gool-goul-goal?) and circle games like bull in the ring, 
London Bridge, run sheep run, red light and even duck on the rock.  We did play 
ball, of course, usually work-up.  If you were little, you played out on the 
woodshed side of the schoolhouse where the elm tree was the only stationary 
base.  The big kids used the diamond on the west side of the schoolhouse.  We 
had no playground equipment; balls and bats came from home.

One of the memories that I have of these athletic events was field day 
sponsored by J. Calvin Linebaugh, County School Superintendent.  The schools of 
the township met in all sorts of athletic competition at our Center school on a 
nice spring day.  There were sack races, relay races, running jumps, broad 
jumps, the high jump---I can’t remember much else about the field day except 
that I dreaded it; for I was a little fat boy and not particularly athletic.  
(I marvel now that I never was nicknamed “Fatty” or “Tubby”.  My brother, John, 
sometimes called me “Swift” but nicknames never caught on and I was always 
called Zack.)  

Sometimes we would play ball at the Johnson School in the spring or early 
fall.  The school board gave us permission to take the afternoon off and 
although we had already walked a mile or more to school, we didn’t complain 
when we walked two more miles to the Johnson School; played nine innings of 
baseball; walked back to the Center and then another mile home.  No doting 
mothers chauffered us about for our extracurricular activities.  In the winter 
we played fox and geese and spent hours sliding on our sleds that we brought 
from home.  Belly flopping down the building grade was the mode.  One time we 
planted a maple tree in the schoolyard on Arbor Day.  It wasn’t tied in with 
any of our school subjects; teacher didn’t call it a field day or a field trip 
and I know that we scholars didn’t worry much about it being a learning 
experience.

Another kind of event I remember with mixed feelings was the spelldown.  We’d 
have them occasionally on Friday afternoons.  I was pretty good in spelling so 
I didn’t suffer undue humiliation.  But as I look back I think that spelling 
bees were cruel.  I know that slower children must have suffered even at the 
hands of a sympathetic teacher who gave them easy words to spell.  They must 
have resented that sort of consideration.  The suffering felt in failure, not 
measuring up, or being ostracized was not unknown to many of us, I’m sure.  
There was often the awful feeling of being the last one picked when choosing up 
sides for games; there was often the unfortunate kid whose frantic waving of 
the index finger was ignored by the teacher and consequently he peed his pants; 
there was always some one singled out by the big boys to pester and plague.  I 
personally experienced some of these unhappy times but for the most part we had 
lots of fun at school.

It was customary for the school kids to put on the Christmas Program.  After 
preliminary practices in the schoolroom we would go across the road to have a 
first and last practice at the church.  We always held the “Christmas 
Exercises” at the Church.  Nothing could equal the excitement and anticipation 
of that event.  The whole neighborhood came to see the “Christmas Exercises”.  
The church was always packed.  Either the teacher had us stay in the annex, 
supervised by one of the trusted eighth graders until it was time for our 
number to be performed or we sat in the front pews of the church, giddy with 
the anticipation of awaiting our turn.  Every one took part in an exercise, a 
recitation or a song with all eight grades participating.  The local preacher 
usually gave an opening prayer.  Just before the arrival of Santa Clause a 
White Christmas offering was taken up for the Children’s Orphanage at 
Farmington.  The separation of church and school was not as important or as 
clearly drawn as today.

The Sunday School always saw to it that every child in school and even the 
little preschoolers, brothers and sisters, got a present.  It was always the 
same---a little box, like a satchel, with a cloth tape handle, filled with 
popcorn, peanuts in the shell and hard candy.  The last number of the program, 
of course, was the appearance of Santa Claus, who came “Ho, ho, ho”ing down the 
center aisle from the back of the church.  We’d always try to guess who was 
Santa Claus and it was a real triumph when no one knew who was the masked Saint 
in that pillow-stuffed red camoric suit trimmed with white muslin “fur”.

I think it was Miss Hunt (Wilma Coe) who used to let us older kids be 
monitors.  We were allowed to leave our seats and answer little kids questions--
-hard words in reading; how to spell a word; or listen to memorization of the 
multiplication table or poems for language class.  I think it was being a 
monitor that made me decide to be a teacher.  I thought it would be great fun 
to answer questions and grade papers; I didn’t know then that I was to begin my 
teaching career in this very schoolroom; but that is another tale.

Before that was to come about there was a whole new life ahead---the awesome 
experience of high school.  We were to leave the secure and familiar world of 
Sebewa in exchange for a one-room school in Kent county to finish our eighth 
grade.  We moved to Bowne Center where we lived for two years with my mother’s 
Aunt Blanche Thompson.  My sister, Helen, and I finished the eighth grade at 
Bowne Center school and attended the first year and a half at the high school 
in Alto.  Then midway in our sophomore year it was back to Sebewa to drive nine 
miles with the Gierman kids to town school at Lake Odessa.  Just to think of 
that unknown was to strike terror to the heart of this little fat farm boy who 
was now fifteen and weighed 196 pounds.”








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