Back To School

School is the topic once again. Do you remember getting your school supplies for the school year? I have put a little thought into my past school years and cannot remember ever having a list of supplies for the first day, let alone for the year. About the only pre-purchased supplies before starting school consisted of pencils and paper. The early years called for the Big Chief, wide-lined tablet and maybe a couple of lead pencils, and progressed to spiral-bound notebooks. Nope, nobody put their names on them either. I do remember having wooden and later plastic pencil boxes that we put our names on. We must have purchased a box of Crayolas, but this I do not remember for sure.

Starting school did not require the purchase of any type of cards, other than lunch tickets. Yes, tickets came before the present day cards. Many youngsters started their years in a country school and lunch tickets were not required there. But you may have gotten to purchase a new lunch pail. Most of those lunch pails were the old black ones, where the thermos fit in the lid. Later, these lunch pails were replaced with the more fancy square or oblong box of colors and cartoon pictures, etc., featured on them. Oh, the thermoses may have been a wide mouth thermos that you could pack soup in.

I am sure parents of that day considered going back to school a little expensive at the time, but I bet they would have been speechless to know what going back to school would cost their future heirs. I am not in any way criticizing today’s system. (My computer didn’t want to spell criticizing, so I had to look it up in my dictionary, a 1915 edition). This is only a remember when.

May all of the back-to-schoolers have a safe and happy school year.