Peirce: Reminiscences

Our Kindergarten room was wonderful. I remember Miss Warneke very well. I am sure there were shrubs, etc. outside the solarium, because it always seemed shady. The Kindergarteners used the door on Gregory Street. Inside we had coat hooks, small tables and chairs, and we did most of our craft work in the solarium. I remember going with my mother to register and I was impressed that the kindergarten class had made Indian headdresses with feathers. When I started school I waited and waited for our turn to make the feathers! Miss Warneke had different ideas for our class. She was a warm and caring person and we always felt loved.

 

 

 

Yes, the playground was a delightful place. The baby playground in back of the field house was almost like a park. There were benches along the outside edge and the baby equipment including swings, merry-go-rounds, teeter totters and “cowboy swings” A wading pool was in the back, center surrounded by trees.

 

When we were old enough to go to the playground on Saturday or after school my best friend Cynthia and I would go to Roy rogers movies at the Calo on Clark St. and then to the playground to pretend we were Dale Evens and play on the Cowboy swings

 

 

 

The School yard at the time ( 1922-1929)

was beautifully landscaped and divided into four sections. The one farthest west was considered the “Boys” playground. The one along Gregory Street was the “Girls”. The two along Bryn Mawr were for a different age group. The one along Bryn Mawr east of the smaller playground had a wading Pool which the people in the area were permitted to bring their infants in the summer to enjoy.

 

 

 

The June class of 1944 graduated in the midst of World War II and was a large class, because most of us were born at the very beginning of the Great Depression. Other classes that followed were smaller. Peirce school was very active during the war with massive paper and scrap drives, War stamps/Bond sales, air raid drills, Red Cross meeting that met in the Field House, and the girls were all put to work knitting 6 inch squares that were made into afghans by the neighborhood mothers for our soldiers.

 

 

 

Our School had a milk program for the students. Each student was given a ½ pint of milk for one cent at a mid morning break. I was given an extra ½ pint for free because I was considered underweight. If a child was good the privilege of filling the desk inkwells was the reward. The ultimate punishment and supreme horror was having to sit on the Principals bench in the office.

 

 

In eighth grade some of the girls and I tried to become “patrol boys” and argued that were every bit as responsible. Mrs. Shea said that they would consider it, but in the end we were told that girls would be too weak to handle the children, and we couldn’t be counted on. So much for womens’s lib in the 1940s.

 

 

 

Of course I remember when the playground was first installed- the swings, giant slides, rings, teeter totters etc. Before that it was one large expanse with a few trees around the perimeter. I remember the dedication of the field house and the introduction of Fred Gohl and Irene Touhl.

 

 

The only recollections I have are of boxed dioramas from the Field Museum that were prominently displayed on the first floor and changed every three or four months. They displayed birds, flowers, and maybe minerals from our area. A strange article in the curriculum in my era was having to know the location of all the cribs ( water intakes) in Lake Michigan off Chicago’s shoreline.

 

 

Kindergarten memories 1. Making butter by shaking a mixture in a glass milk bottle

2. The cloak/coat room where disobedient pupils were sent to repent.

3. I think there was also a “dunce cap “ punishment.

 

 

–from the 100 Anniversary exhibition (October 2015)