With less than two weeks remaining until a new academic year begins, families are stocking up on their children’s school clothes, buying supplies and picking out just the right lunch boxes.

It’s an annual rite of passage that prompted Sumner Senior Center member Ruth Hubrich to recall some of her own back-to-school days and what life was like 75 years ago for a fourth-grade girl.

“I’m a product of the Depression and then the war,” she said. “I grew up on the south side of Chicago.”

School clothes

Hubrich’s dad co-owned a gas station with her uncle. Money was tight – he could only sell to customers who had gas ration tickets, she said.

But finances never prevented her mom, Elsa Lehmann, from providing good school clothes.

“She made all my clothes,” she said. “She had an oblong, electric sewing machine with a lid on it. When it closed it looked like a beautiful piece of furniture. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

One of her favorite clothes was a green tweed coat. “It had buttons down the front and my mom used brown fur for the collar from an adult’s coat,” she said. “I wore it in the winter; Chicago could get very cold.”

Transportation

Hubrich walked to school, good weather and bad.

“We always started school the day after Labor Day; it was very hot when school opened,” she said. “In the winter, it could get very cold and icy.

“Chicago didn’t have school buses that I know of, although one girl in my class rode the streetcar.

“It was a pretty good walk, I guess about one mile,” she continued. “The police helped me with the main crossing to make sure we didn’t get hit with a streetcar.”

School

She attended Arthur Dixon Elementary, a “beautiful, two-story yellow brick building,” she said.

“It was brand new when I started in kindergarten,” she said. When she graduated in eighth grade, her class was the first to have attended all nine years.

Mr. Schenk was her principal. “He was such a very kind man – I can picture him,” she said. Her teacher was Miss O’Connor, who taught in a classroom of 48 students, each in a desk that was connected to a chair and fastened to the floor.

“And now they complain about 20-something students being too many,” she remarked.

Every once in a while, there were a few more students than available desks; those pupils had to sit in front of the class at long library desks, she added.

Each desk had an ink well that held an ink bottle. “They provided ink in big bottles,” she said. “Someone was in charge of filling the bottles. We had writing tools that had a point on it, with ends that fit into a wooden holder. Later, people had fountain pens.”

She never witnessed boys dipping girls’ pigtails into the ink, she said with a smile. “We were civilized.”

School days

“We had arithmetic, we never called it math,” she said. “We also had English – which we called grammar – and spelling.”

In her earlier years she studied the Palmer method of penmanship and continued it in Miss O’Connor’s class. “We didn’t do much printing,” she said. “Now, the kids print.”

Her favorite subject was spelling.

“I liked the spelling bees,” she said. “We’d line up on two sides of the classroom and when we misspelled a word, we sat down.” She was usually one of the last students remaining.

Other school activities included the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance; occasionally singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” she said; steam heat from coal; electric bells resounding at 9 a.m. and 3 p.m., and windows that were periodically covered with ice.

Lunchtime

Because the school had no lunchroom, Hubrich, like others, walked home for lunch. It was always ready for the hour-long break and filled with the aroma of her mom’s home-cooked soups.

“Most of the mothers were home – they ran the house and did all the childcare,” she said. “Mom made tomato soup from tomatoes she had canned and vegetable soup, too.”

Because the family lived in an apartment, they purchased their produce in the summer at a farmer’s market “a block long and not too far from our home,” she said. “We were never hungry.”

Recess

Hubrich’s eyes lit up when she recalled recess.

“The boys played on one playground and the girls played on another,” she said. “We weren’t all mingled. We didn’t have any play equipment – no teeter-totters, fire ladders, or bars to climb on.”

But they had fun.

“We played jump rope and double-dutch, Red Rover and Mother, May I?,” she said. “We also played a game with a golf ball where we bounced the ball, swung our leg over the ball and had to say something.”

As for the boys, Hubrich wasn’t sure what they played but she assumed they were “probably much different things,” she said.

Entertainment

The school’s auditorium was a nice one and resembled Puyallup High’s, she said. Plays required costumes, some furnished by her mom.

“My mother made really nice costumes,” she said.

One of her school plays was about countries in Europe, she recalled. “I was supposed to be a Swedish girl and in another one, I was Dutch – it probably had something to do with me being blonde.”

When the plays were finished, the costumes didn’t go to waste, she said. “We had to be thrifty and creative; that’s how you made it back then,” she said. “We used my costume for Halloween and after that, my sister wore it.”

Hubrich said she enjoyed her years at Arthur Dixon Elementary and the chance to share her back-to-school memories.

“Why didn’t that ever come up before?” she asked. “Why don’t we talk about these things?”