This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Community Corner

Memories of the Old Montgomery School

Columnist Pat Torrance takes you back to school — the old Montgomery School, which is now Nicholson Elementary.

Whenever a group of former Montgomery School students get together, the talk quickly turns to Montgomery School and long remembered teachers. There is no contest when it comes to the most dreaded. 

Hands down, it was Miss Grace Merrill, the sixth grade teacher. Small of stature, she cultivated a tough as nails image. It didn’t matter if it was a bluff or the real thing—it worked. She had a round face, wore small wire rim glasses and could conjure up a stern glare at the drop of a spitball. The biggest tough guy would wilt in his undersize desk.

Grace Merrill loved horses, usually wearing jewelry with a horse motif. I’ve been told that she mellowed with age, even took her later students on a field trip to her farm to see the horses. Not so in the '40s. Perhaps she was still establishing her reputation and perfecting her technique.

Find out what's happening in Montgomerywith free, real-time updates from Patch.

In the '30s, when the school wasn’t yet part of a larger school district and the teachers played by their own rules, one stubborn boy spent years in Miss Merrill’s classroom. She refused to promote him until he met her requirements, and it wasn’t until he turned 16, and with his mother’s permission, that he finally quit. He joked that his one regret about that was losing the opportunity to snitch cigarettes from his teacher. 

At an open house several years ago, one of her former pupils, a tall muscular man, knelt down by her chair and confessed to her. “Miss Merrill, you always scared the heck out of me, and you still do!” Everyone within hearing distance laughed. 

Find out what's happening in Montgomerywith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Every kindergartner heard about the infamous Miss Bonestengel. The name alone sent chills up their little spines, and the ones who survived her class would delight in telling horror stories of life in her third grade classroom, exaggerated or not. 

Kindergartners had a lovely plump little teacher named Mrs. Wiggins. She greeted her pupils every morning playing a piano tune and singing, “Good morning to you, good morning to you. We’re all in our places... With bright shiny faces... Good morning to you.”

She was a good teacher, and the children loved her, and they learned. But like all of us, she had her own idiosyncrasies. One was her habit of changing out of her teaching outfit (a plain cotton dress) to a nicer black crepe number before she went home.

Since there was no place to change in her basement classroom, she used a corner of her room, behind the piano where there was a small window. Before long, some curious little rascals, on their way home, discovered they could peek in and see their teacher in her petticoat! I’m not sure she ever knew about the Peeping Toms, but it was a loosely guarded secret among the boys.

Every fall there was a fire drill. This was an exciting event, anticipated by all. It involved opening the big steel doors at the ground level of the big tube that was the fire escape. When the fire bell rang, the children were marched into the upstairs classroom and lined up and ushered down the dark chute that spiraled through the tube. 

The first children to go down pulled a large gunnysack up over their lower half to clean off the dust and grime that collected during the summer. At the bottom they would have to kick open the doors from the inside. The first time a child had to enter this dark chute, it was terrifying. By the time they were in the upper grades it became fun, and the bigger boys vied for the chance to go down first and kick open the doors.

Another highlight of the day awaited the 7th and 8th grade class, who had the privilege of being taught by the principal, Miss Nicholson. Few children were ever sent to the principal’s office because all of the teachers were pretty effective in handling problems as they came up. (And this seems to have been easier in Montgomery, because they had good support from the parents.)

Besides being a very effective teacher, whose students had been well prepared by the time they got to her classroom, she knew the history of every family in the school, and seemed to genuinely care for every child. 

Every day after lunch, she took out one of the popular classic books and would read a new installment. It was a great way to calm down the restless class, just returning from a rowdy lunchtime recess. She chose books that would hold the attention of  both boys and girls, such as Jack London’s "Call Of The Wild," and Herman Melville’s "Moby Dick."

Students were assigned poetry to memorize, and even the toughest boys could and did recite several stanzas of Longfellow’s "Evangeline" or John Greenleaf Whittier’s "Snow Bound." In fact, one winter day a group of adults, both men and women, met for lunch after a morning meeting in the village. As they left the restaurant, the sky was dark and ominous and all, in unison, started reciting, “The sun that brief December day, rose cheerless over hills of gray, and darkly circled, gave at noon, a sadder light than waning moon.” Miss Nicholson would have been proud.

Lunchtime at Montgomery School in the early years—prior to the '60s—was a very different experience. There was a makeshift lunchroom in the basement next to the furnace. There were long picnic tables where the children sat and opened their lunches. The wiser children carried their lunch in folded newspaper packets. This made a placemat when opened, and after seeing the way the janitor cleaned the tables after lunch, most people wouldn’t want their food to touch the surface. 

Floors were cleaned with an oil mop, and more than once, the elderly, overworked janitor would finish cleaning the classrooms and take the mop to the basement and make a quick sweep across the surface of the tables. I suppose he thought this was efficient, but sanitary it was not. Most children opted to go home for lunch, especially if they had a bicycle.

The infamous Miss Merrill once decided it was up to her to improve our lunchroom experience. She joined us a few times and tried to teach us to “masticate” our food a certain number of times, maybe 10 or 20, before swallowing. Around our own dinner tables at home it would be called dawdling. It met considerable resistance and she eventually gave up on the lessons. Her heart was in the right place, but the effort failed. We were bent on stuffing down our sandwiches as quickly as possible to get out to the playground.

Most people have very positive feelings about their experiences at Montgomery school. We never had any doubt that the teachers had our best interests at heart. They were in partnership with our parents, determined to mold us into people who would make them proud. We left 8th Grade with all the tools we would need to follow our individual paths.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?