Having heard it was about to be demolished, one Sunday afternoon in the late 1950s my father drove by his old one-room country school. While his young sons watched from the car, Dad parked along the gravel road, climbed a fence and walked into the dilapidated structure.

He spent several minutes in the rural building, apparently remembering the eight years he had spent there.

I now understand his visit.

After all these years I still have memories of my old school buildings.

My family moved frequently when I was a youngster so I attended several schools over the years, the first in Ellsworth. I was enrolled in a nine-week kindergarten program there in the spring of 1954.

The most memorable feature of Ellsworth’s elementary school was a big metal fire escape tube on the west side of the building. I never had to use the chute as a fire escape but I enjoyed playing in it many times, usually during the summer when there were no teachers around to shoo us away. I slipped off my shoes, my sweaty feet providing better traction for the climb to the top which was an extremely hot spot on a sunny summer day. I then slipped a wax paper bread wrapper under my fanny for a quick slide down the chute.

Midway through second grade we moved to nearby Jewell where, years earlier, that school district had purchased the defunct Jewell Lutheran College campus which included a dormitory, a classroom building and a gymnasium.

Elementary classrooms were in the former dormitory in front of which stood a large bell. Good boys and girls were allowed to ring that bell to signal the end of noon recess. I don’t recall getting to ring the bell very often.

The elementary building was rather nondescript but the old college gymnasium was a memorable place. Above one of the doors was a sign reminding competitors, “When the One Great Scorer comes to write against your name, it matters not whether you won or lost but how you played the game.”

During sixth-grade we moved to Sibley in far northwest Iowa where the large Central School housed kindergarten through 12th grade. I remember a ledge immediately below the second story windows.

One of the most exciting moments to occur during my short time there was when one of the girls in my class climbed out onto that ledge during the lunch hour. When the teachers finally coaxed her back inside the building they looked relieved and our classmate was crying. I don’t remember what was troubling the girl.

Later that year we returned to Hamilton County and began attending school at Kamrar.

A memorable feature of the Kamrar school was the small gym. The free throw circles nearly touched the center circle on the gym floor. Basketball fans watched from a stage at the north end of the gym, from bleachers on one side of the gym and from a balcony immediately above those bleachers.

More memorable was the hole someone had chiseled along the steam pipes in the wall separating the boys’ and girls’ restrooms. By standing on a toilet in the boys’ room, one could peep through the hole for a peek into the girls’ restroom. Someone’s labors, however, were futile. One could only see the upper portion of the opposite wall in the girls’ restroom.

Trust me.

In the fall of 1962, when I was a high school freshman, the Kamrar, Blairsburg and Williams school districts merged into the Northeast Hamilton Community School District. High school classes were held in the Blairsburg building. I remember the layout of that school well. A coat room across an open area from the principal’s office stands out in my memory. It was in that room that my classmate, Lyle, and I anxiously awaited an appointment with the “board” of education, also known as a paddle. Fortunately, after a good scolding our principal handed down a difficult but less painful punishment.

Most of the schools I attended have been torn down; Central school in Sibley burned down. (I had nothing to do with that!)

Standing or not, those old buildings left a lot of memories — most of them good.

Arvid Huisman can be contacted at huismaniowa@gmail.com. ©2025 by Huisman Communications.