Tag: moving

Frew School

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I remember the day Mom registered me for school clearly.

I stood behind her while she talked with my teacher, Mrs. Clawson. After Mom left, Mrs. Clawson showed me into the classroom and gave me an empty desk.

The school had three classrooms and six grades, so there were two grades in each one. Mrs. Clawson taught first and second grade. Miss Nesbitt taught third and fourth grades. Mrs. Dahl taught fifth and sixth grades. Each classroom had its own area for us to hang our coats and store our boots.

The classrooms were all lined up in a row on the east side of the building. My classroom was the first one inside the front door, then the middle grades, and finally the upper grades.

The other side of the building housed the bathrooms, the lunchroom, and the kitchen.

Sometimes the tables and chairs would be folded up, giving us an open space for activities. I especially remember the times when the record player came out. Mrs. Johnston visited once a week to teach music, and I think that may have been when we learned the bunny hop. I can still picture us hopping around the room in a circle with our hands on each other’s shoulders as the music played.

I settled quickly into the new school. I liked my teacher and the other kids. There were swings on the playground, and I especially liked playing hopscotch on the cement entrance to the school with the other girls during recess.

Dad found a new job right away. He said he was a Fuller Brush Man. I didn’t know what he did at first. He said he went door-to-door selling things. He showed me the case he carried with him and all the things inside it. Some of them were pretty interesting.

We lived down a long driveway. Across the highway was another long driveway with a farm at the end. That is where my friend JoAnn lived.

We stayed there longer than we had in Galva, and before long it felt like home.

Moving Again: From Galva to Aledo

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We stayed in Galva through Christmas of 1958. I remember the colored lights, and Mom letting me help put tinsel on the tree for the first time.

I turned seven a month later. Soon after that, it was time to move again.

I liked living in Galva a lot. It was different from the farm in a lot of ways.

City streets instead of gravel roads.

Walking to school. I loved school — especially learning to read. 

I had school friends to play with. Some lived close enough that I could walk to their houses after school.

Dad sold his milk trucks, and soon we were on our way. 

 We moved west again, this time just east of Aledo along Illinois Route 17. 

Our new home sat halfway between our old farm near Viola and where Mom had grown up, northwest of Aledo in Millersburg.

It is the same general area I had always lived in, except for the nine months or so we lived in Galva.

As much as I liked living in town, I was also glad to be back on the farm, even if it wasn’t the same farm. This time, Dad wasn’t farming. We moved into a tenant house next door to Nellie Briggs, the lady who owned the farm. Someone else farmed the land for her. 

Our little tenant house was much smaller than the stately white main house, but it was cute and very well kept. It had only two bedrooms, but we made it work with our bunk beds.

There was one thing about this house that worried me, though. The heat came from pipes in the walls, which I wasn’t used to. I thought the heat meant it could catch on fire, but Mom assured me it was safe. She said the house was heated by a system of water pipes in the walls. It was warmed by the coal furnace in the basement.

Just in case, though, I always had a backup plan — in case we ever did have a fire. I would smash the window next to my bed with Jocko, my teddy bear.

Fortunately, that plan was never needed. 

Not long after we moved into the tenant house near Aledo, Mom took me to register at Frew School.

Never Far From Home

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From the summer before I started school, until the spring of my third grade year, I attended five different schools.

One place we stayed a couple of years. Three others we stayed a very short time, hardly more than a few months. In the third grade alone, I attended four different schools. I never questioned why until much later in life, when it was too late to ask anyone.

We moved from the farm, near Viola, Illinois, to Galva, Illinois, 30 miles to the east. There I started school in 1958. 

By the spring of the next year, we moved back to the Viola area, near Aledo, Illinois. I finished first grade here, attended all of second grade, but before Christmas of the third grade, we moved again, this time 44 miles west to Burlington, Iowa. I was disappointed because I had a part in the upcoming Christmas play.

I remember we spent Christmas in Burlington, but we moved again shortly after, this time 72 miles northeast to Rock Island, Illinois.

We didn’t stay long in Rock Island, either, and by spring we moved again. Our move this time took us back to my mother‘s childhood home in the small village of Millersburg, Illinois, 7 miles northwest of Aledo. 

There I would live for more than 40 years.

If you wonder why I mention the distances between towns, it is to show that we were never far from Aledo, where I was born in Mercer County Hospital in 1952 — the same hospital where my own children would be born years later. We never strayed far from our roots or our families.

My parents are gone now, so I can’t ask them why we moved so often during those three years. With the moves came job changes for Dad.

Looking back, I understand more than I did then. Those were hard years in the Midwest. Jobs weren’t always steady, and people took work wherever they could find it.

But as a child, I didn’t see any of that.

Both Mom and Dad were very hard workers — and my dad always had a job. If one ended, another one soon followed. We never went without anything. If things were tough for them, they never let us feel it.

All I knew was that we kept moving…

and somehow, we were never very far from home.

Moving from the Farm Into Town

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In early summer of 1958, after school was out for Monty, we moved from our farm in Wanlock, just outside Viola, Illinois, to Galva — about 30 miles east — where my world expanded in ways I couldn’t yet begin to imagine. Life would never be quite the same. 

There were so many “firsts.” For the first time in my six years of life: 

– The wide open spaces of the farm were replaced by  houses that were built closer together with a state highway outside our front door that I was forbidden to cross. 

– We had indoor plumbing! I was fascinated by the bathtub, which Mom let me play in sometimes. That meant no more baths at the kitchen sink, and no more trips to the outhouse when it was raining or in the cold of winter. 

– I was finally old enough to start school that next fall.  I had been begging for this for a couple of years, and now my fondest wish was granted. It would impact my life in ways I could not have foreseen, and set me on a journey of learning that continues to this day. 

– I lost my best friend and constant companion —  Brownie, our farm dog. City ordinances said he had to be tied. He was clearly unhappy, so he went to live on another farm with new children to play with. 

– Monty and I had a little more freedom. The town was small, but it had a candy store in the center of town. We were occasionally allowed to walk there to spend our nickels and dimes. There was also a concrete wading pool nearby which was open to the public — but couldn’t have been more than a foot deep. I had to sit or lie down to get wet all over.

– I made new friends. Susie lived a short distance away. The Mohnen twins (both boys) lived across the street. The lady who lived opposite us on the other side of the state highway liked to hold me on her lap, but I could only go see her if Mom was with me. 

I missed the farm, but there were so many new experiences that I also enjoyed so I adjusted quickly. 

The move into town was only the beginning of a lifetime of learning and growth. 

I would never visit the farm again except for two or three times as an adult when we were in the area, a nod to the nostalgia of my childhood. But sadness in losing it never truly came, because it is deeply embedded in my memory and lives on in my stories. That is why I write them — to remember, and for them to live on in the lives of my children and grandchildren and all who come after. It is also to leave behind a small bit of history —  to tell what life was like on a northwestern Illinois farm in the 1950s.

Leaving the Farm

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We lived on the farm until I was six years old. Dad sold all the animals and equipment, but he kept his milk trucks. The milk routes were one of the main reasons we moved — now he had access to two creameries instead of just one.

We moved to a new town, where I started school. Learning to read was thrilling, and it remains one of the great joys of my life. I remember Dick and Jane, and Spot and Puff, with deep fondness.

Everything was different there — city streets instead of gravel roads. We brought Brownie, of course, but a city ordinance meant he had to be tied up. We lived on a highway at the edge of town, and our small yard was a poor substitute for the acres of farmland he once roamed.

Mom and Dad said it wasn’t fair to keep him tied. He was sad — a farm dog, after all, used to chasing rabbits and running through open pastures. So Dad found him a home on a farm belonging to a good customer on one of his milk routes. I was sad, too. I missed him terribly. But Dad said Brownie was happier there, and that gave me comfort.

Over the next two years, we moved several more times to accommodate Dad’s changing business. Near the end of my third-grade year, Dad sold the milk trucks, found a better job, and purchased Mom’s childhood home in a small rural village only a few miles from the farm.

Soon after, Mom enrolled me in school — the one I came to think of fondly as The Little Red Schoolhouse. It was the same country school that Mom and her eight brothers and sisters had attended before me.

Black-and-white historic photograph of Millersburg School building with students and teachers posed in front.

Millersburg School building, which housed grades 1–8 (later
1–6) before closing in 1962. Historic photo — not my class.
Color rendering of the Millersburg School re-created from the historic photo.


The entire school, grades 1–6, fit into two classrooms. Most grades had six to eight students. Some had fewer. When I was in fifth grade, there were only four children in fourth.

It was small in a way that felt personal.