Read Online The Children's Blizzard by David Laskin - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: David Laskin
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Litigants dropped into W.C.’s office, teachers and prospective brides consulted with Edna, young shopkeepers or farmers stopped by for advice or medical care. When the beds and floor overflowed with overnight guests, Edna spread a blanket on the piano top. For the Allen boys it was bliss. The teenage Will and Hugh promptly went to work setting type for the local newspapers, and Will, who was especially enterprising, petitioned the City Council for permission to open a lemonade stand on Main Street—which his father, as police justice, denied. Young Walter, meanwhile, was collecting rat-tlesnake skins on the prairie (which rolled right up to the edge of their backyard), falling down badger holes, tumbling off roofs, messing about in the James River, and fooling around with guns.
(When he was seven, Walter and a friend fired off a shell from a single-shot .22 rifle that grazed the forehead of one of their female neighbors, a fierce Prussian woman named Mrs. Messerschmidt, which landed them in W.C.’s “court.”) And of course, for a few months every fall and winter, there was school. Groton’s citizens organized a school district in February 1882, after the initial frenzy of construction died down, and by the following December, the town’s first schoolhouse was finished—a rather grand two-story four-room hip-roofed frame building set all by itself on the bald, bare prairie half a mile west of Main Street. The idea behind this remote location was that the town was expected to expand and engulf the school—but meanwhile, until that happened, the Groton school stood like a sentry at the edge of the great flat abyss. W.C. naturally took a place on the Groton board of education.
Fifty pupils walked out on schooldays, cutting through the backyards of the houses and business buildings that stood one deep along Main Street, skirting outhouses and heaps of barrels and crates, dodging the fence of the St. Croix Lumber Yard, and finally ascending the imperceptible rise to what would be dubbed Presby-terian Hill. Jessie Warren, the district’s first teacher, earned thirty-eight dollars a month for her troubles, which was good pay for a female teacher back then (the men usually got between 30 and 50 percent more). A few years later she was succeeded by a hapless young “professor” from an Indiana business college who had never taught school before. Somehow Walter Allen discovered that the teacher was frantically cramming every night in an attempt to stay one step ahead of the class, and he hatched a scheme to unmask him. Walter and his accomplices, who couldn’t have been more than seven or eight years old, studied their “fool heads off,” as family lore relates, reading pages and pages ahead of the daily assign-ments and easily outpacing their teacher. In class each day the boys would torment the “professor” by stumping him with questions about material he hadn’t gotten to yet. This is quite sophisticated compared to the typical prairie school prank of strong-arming the teacher outside the schoolhouse and then locking the door. Being "turned out” or “carried out” by the bigger farm boys was the worst nightmare of many a country schoolteacher. One Indiana schoolteacher was only able to regain control of his schoolhouse by capping the chimney and literally smoking the children out. Or so the story went.
But Walter Allen was no rude farm boy, as he would have been the first to point out. A wry sense of humor, a streak of mischief, and the twinkling conviction that he was clever enough to get away with anything were traits he shared with his older half brother Will. The two boys, though born ten years apart, were extremely close. Will and Walter were both impulsive, and in difficult situations both preferred to take matters into their own hands rather than heed their elders.
Like a lot of brothers, they seemed to have an instinct for knowing when the other was in trouble—which in those days on the prairie
(When he was seven, Walter and a friend fired off a shell from a single-shot .22 rifle that grazed the forehead of one of their female neighbors, a fierce Prussian woman named Mrs. Messerschmidt, which landed them in W.C.’s “court.”) And of course, for a few months every fall and winter, there was school. Groton’s citizens organized a school district in February 1882, after the initial frenzy of construction died down, and by the following December, the town’s first schoolhouse was finished—a rather grand two-story four-room hip-roofed frame building set all by itself on the bald, bare prairie half a mile west of Main Street. The idea behind this remote location was that the town was expected to expand and engulf the school—but meanwhile, until that happened, the Groton school stood like a sentry at the edge of the great flat abyss. W.C. naturally took a place on the Groton board of education.
Fifty pupils walked out on schooldays, cutting through the backyards of the houses and business buildings that stood one deep along Main Street, skirting outhouses and heaps of barrels and crates, dodging the fence of the St. Croix Lumber Yard, and finally ascending the imperceptible rise to what would be dubbed Presby-terian Hill. Jessie Warren, the district’s first teacher, earned thirty-eight dollars a month for her troubles, which was good pay for a female teacher back then (the men usually got between 30 and 50 percent more). A few years later she was succeeded by a hapless young “professor” from an Indiana business college who had never taught school before. Somehow Walter Allen discovered that the teacher was frantically cramming every night in an attempt to stay one step ahead of the class, and he hatched a scheme to unmask him. Walter and his accomplices, who couldn’t have been more than seven or eight years old, studied their “fool heads off,” as family lore relates, reading pages and pages ahead of the daily assign-ments and easily outpacing their teacher. In class each day the boys would torment the “professor” by stumping him with questions about material he hadn’t gotten to yet. This is quite sophisticated compared to the typical prairie school prank of strong-arming the teacher outside the schoolhouse and then locking the door. Being "turned out” or “carried out” by the bigger farm boys was the worst nightmare of many a country schoolteacher. One Indiana schoolteacher was only able to regain control of his schoolhouse by capping the chimney and literally smoking the children out. Or so the story went.
But Walter Allen was no rude farm boy, as he would have been the first to point out. A wry sense of humor, a streak of mischief, and the twinkling conviction that he was clever enough to get away with anything were traits he shared with his older half brother Will. The two boys, though born ten years apart, were extremely close. Will and Walter were both impulsive, and in difficult situations both preferred to take matters into their own hands rather than heed their elders.
Like a lot of brothers, they seemed to have an instinct for knowing when the other was in trouble—which in those days on the prairie