Snow: And the Snow Season Then and Now

James
C. Johnston Jr.

I have very clear memories of snow reaching back into the 1940’s when I was a rather small child. The house I lived in, which is the house I still live in, was built in 1760 by a miller and militia Captain Oliver Pond of Union Village or as it became better known, Unionville. This house was constructed of chestnut. Its beams measured eight by ten inches. Some were even larger. The sides were boarded in with chestnut boards which had been cut in saw-pits by two men pushing and pulling on a two-man saw. These chestnut boards are about two inches thick. The result is a very sturdy building which has stood-up to the savage New England climate for two-hundred and sixty-six years. This ancient domestic fortress defied tropical hurricanes and Nor’easters for more than two-and-a-half centuries with utter impunity.

I actually get a bit put-out when people who are in the insurance business and real-estate, and who are supposed to know better, put my house in the same category with some old balloon framed cottage of a mere 150 years of age most of which are made from two-by-fours and cheap three-quarter-inch pine planking. This awful post-Civil War construction should not even be thought of in any comparison with my chestnut planked house with a frame and planking with the strength of cast iron!

I have taken and passed the appraiser’s course given by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, because I was once an elected assessor in the Town of Franklin. The part of the course dealing with actual home construction is actually not very thorough. Certainly historical construction is not really even considered by appraisers even though many tens of thousands of homes built between 1636 and 1860 survive in the commonwealth not to mention all the housing built between 1860 and 1926. But alas, I digress.

When I was a child, it was a good deal colder than it is now. Zero degree days in the 1940’s through the 1970’s were fairly common. I can remember hundreds of winter days between the 1940’s and late 1960’s which were routinely, and sometimes substantially, under zero degrees. I remember being in my bed secure under three quilts and some blankets waiting to hear a certain, actually the blast of a signal from the Joseph Gordon Ray Franklin Fire Station which was a sound known to every school-age-child that meant liberation for the day from school which I sometimes detested with a passion!

I had more than a few really stupid teachers, of great antiquity and dullness, who must have terrified Horace Mann when he was their student back in the very early 1800’s! Elementary school teachers back in those days were exclusively female. Before the Civil War Era, male school masters reined over most country schools with a birch rod and very limited educational backgrounds for the most part. As one got closer to the cities and wealthier communities teachers were far more professional. But getting back to the school teachers of my day, I think that some of these awful older women got pleasure from torturing their charges, especially those kids who came from poor families or broken homes.

One of these nasty old gals was very fond of using her ruler as a weapon in the battle of Education of the Masses! I remember in the autumn of 1951, my second grade teacher at the Ray School really enjoyed intimidating one little guy. He wore a straw hat and no socks. How amazing was that in good Old Franklin in 1951! It seems that his folks had been share-croppers and had a very hard time. They eventually lost their farm. They then made a living as migrant labor, and Franklin had some farms back in those days that sometimes employed seasonal labor to pick the crops like apples, and harvest other crops like wheat, corn, and other vegetables.

I didn’t even know if this poor kid could read. All I knew was that I had never seen anyone so alone in my whole life. The Keating-Owen Child Labor Act of 1916 required this little guy to go to school until he was sixteen years of age which on the face of it a very good thing. But putting this poor kid into a group of snotty middle class near-do-wells was hardly an act of kindness when almost everybody he met went out of the way to inform him that he was some sort of low-life, not only that, but also told him that his brand of Christianity did not fit-in with the sort of Christianity that was in vogue in Dear Old Franklin at the time. And back in those days, everybody thinking the same thing was though of by many as some species of patriotic virtue.

His sort of Christianity for example didn’t allow its adherents to salute the flag, because doing that was in their eyes a sort of worshiping of the states in place of The Deity. Now, even at seven I could understand that. My second grade teacher however could not stand for any breach of conformity when it came to maintaining accepted forms of All-American behaviors. Because this little guy refused to salute the flag on religious grounds, she made that poor little kid sit in front of the class in his chair facing the class while we saluted the flag which was “a symbol of freedom” except for this little guy whose name I cannot recall or perhaps never knew. The next day, the old biddy dragged the chair and the little kid out in front of the class for The Pledge of Allegiance.

This time I pulled my chair out in front of the class too, and I placed it next to the little guy and sat facing my classmates. My teacher was horrified. “Jimmy Johnston! What are you doing! Your father fought in the War. He is a patriot! What do think he would say?”

I had waited for an opening like this. I had stood-up to my adult relatives when they tried to bully me, and my father’s reaction to that was always, “Let the kid speak.”

“My father would say, ‘Let the kid speak,’ “I said.“

“What!” my teacher almost screamed.

“You asked me what my father would say if somebody would not like what I said, or I think that is what you mean by what you said.” I replied.

“Why are you siding with him instead of your class?” she cried.

“Because you are picking on him for loving God more than the flag, and that is bad. My parents told me that we have freedom of religion.” I replied with the wisdom of my seven-year-old logic.

Now this put a new slant on things, and she retreated back to the pledge which was a safer area. I was very happy when it snowed and I did not have to see her or her ilk again, but the next day the school bus came at the appointed hour to carry us off to school where we were frequently taught a great deal of racist rubbish. For example we were taught several geography units about: Eskimos, the people of the Kirgiz Steppes, the tulip growing Netherlands where young boys liked to save the neighborhood by sticking their fingers into dikes, and the Malaysian, or as they said over seventy years ago, the Malay Peninsula. Once again my teacher was essentially clueless. She believed everything in the text book quite uncritically.

She taught us that the young people of the Malay race were called Negritoes, and the reason that they all had curly hair was that in ancient times there was a great fire that threatened to burn-up the whole peninsula. All of the “Natives” dug holes and jumped into them so that only the tops of their heads were exposed to the flames. This singed their hair according to the text making every one of the “Negritoes” to possess curly and dark hair forever after. No Doubt this woman believed this to be true. The only thing wrong with that rather picturesque narrative is that Malaysians do not look like that at all. I have a fair number of close Malaysian friends who are highly educated and far more cosmopolitan than any of my dear old teachers, that is, with a few notable exceptions.

When I first told this story about “The Negritoes” of my primitive geographical education to my friend Mohammed Azham Wazi, of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia he laughed until tears flowed down his cheeks. I might add that Azham and his father were both graduates of universities in California. Azham had me repeat this curious story to his parents when they came to visit me in Franklin. “People really believed that stuff about the Malay people and that ‘Negrito’ nonsense?” asked Azham’s father when I told him the story.

I replied, “Rural Americans were pretty primitive back in 1951 I guess. You have got to remember that most Americans of the pre 1940 generation had a very limited view of the world and tended to believe anything that persons in positions of authority told them. In fact, in some parts of this country today “blind obedience to authority” is still seen as a virtue. Critical thinking is often criticized by the ultra-right as an undermining factor to “Good Order”. Thinking is always seen as dangerous by some people who tend to like things just as they are with all of their most cherished prejudices left quite undisturbed and intact.”

When I was a kid, I really liked being sick! I could stay home. I could read books-which I did constantly-mostly world history. My being sick gave me far better educational opportunities than going to school in the early and mid- 1950’s. In point of fact my fifth grade teacher went so far as to tell my mother that I read far too much and was also reading far too sophisticated material. My fifth-grade teacher had also been my mother’s fifth grade teacher, and my mother informed her that I was doing just fine.

My teacher then said, “But he knows far too much for his age. I even asked him [meaning me] about the last Czar of Russia. And he told me all about Nicholas II and what happened to his family. I had to go and look this up, and Jimmy was right. Now, that’s too much for any child to know at eleven years old.”

When my mother came home from parent’s night she told my all about the conversation. We both laughed about it. I had read about the fall of the imperial House of Romanoff during the luxury of my last long illness. I tried very hard never to let school get in the way of my education. I also loved my winter holidays when the fire signal sounded indicating that school was cancelled for the whole blessed day, and I could go outside into the vast frozen waste of deep winter and build great Gothic Castles out of the mountains of snow my father had shoveled so very early in the morning so that he could go to work and create things as a master molder in his foundry.

What fabulous things he made out of iron: Hessian Andirons, Cricket Shoe Pullers or “Boot Jacks”, Custom Clock Weights, Eagle Match Boxes, and all sort of things from tiny objects to keels for very large ocean-going craft. He could create anything made of iron from molds of sand and oil. To me it was all magic and a mysterious sort of alchemy!

And those winters were magic. The snow was feet and yards deep in certain drifts. We built forts and had battles. I got to read a lot of books when the ever-hateful school was closed. Years later I became a teacher, and I got a chance to change a lot of things in the instruction of my students. My contemporaries were largely of the same opinion, and education has gotten a lot better. Critical thinking is an important skill to develop in the great school of life.

I like winter a good deal less than I did seventy-odd years ago, and I have a very guilty secret that I dare share with very few of my friends, and that is that there are some aspects of global warming I do not loath even though I should. With my deep interest in historic geology, and going back to the lectures of my esteemed professor of the subject, Dr. Ira Furlong, The Law of Uniformitarianism comes to mind. “Physical forces which have been at work in the natural operation of the planet over the history of the planet will always be at work, and in the same manner.”

This observation, among many other things observed in nature means that the forces at work today will always be busy, and that the only sure “constant” in our evolution will be the “constant” of “Change”. “Change” we must understand, and “Change” we must embrace and adapt to. Soon I shall be 82 years of age. That will be an exciting change to embrace and finally adapt to. Man! Those winters of long ago were really cold!