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Stuart’s store in town.” Pullen couldn’t remember exactly, but Ruby thinks that the textbooks at the time were still McGuffey’s reader, Smith’s Grammar, Davis’ arithmetic and the Spencerian copy book.
Pullen walked to school from up above the town where Colonel Parsons’ farm is now. “Cold, why I never got cold,” he said. “I had good leather boots and good yam socks.”
Pullen remembers Miss Margaret Compton, who lived in town. She taught at Rabbit Gum as did her sister Ida Wood, Mr. Jett and Miss Bell, all teachers during Pullen’s term in school.
Pullen liked Miss Ida best, he said, but all the teachers made sure that the students learned their lessons. “If you missed a word in spelling, then you sat down,” he said, speaking of the spelling bees held regularly. “But if you missed three words in a lesson, then you had to ‘set in.’ ” “Setting in” meant staying after school for ten minutes after the other children left for the day.
Heat was provided by a long, cast-iron stove, Pullen said, with two lids on top. “Some of the older boys would get up and stir it up and carry in wood,” he remembered. “Billy Fox was one. Cecil Compton was one — but he left from here and got a job on the railroad.”
At recess the boys played baseball. “There was a real baseball diamond right in front,” Pullen said. “Sometimes the ball would go clear out by the Dudley’s house - the Carter house.”
For lunch Pullen and his friends brought biscuits and preserves in the */i gallon Karo syrup buckets or King’s buckets that served as lunch pails for a whole country of children in those days. “Sometimes we had bags and sometimes we’d bring them in our pockets, but mostly it was those syrup cans,” Pullen said.
With lunch the beverage was water, drawn from the Carter’s well.
After school, those who did not have to “set in” began their trip back home on foot. There were lucky ones who had horses to ride. These were tied in an alley while school was in sessions.
For their services, the Rabbit Gum teachers in Mr. Pullen’s time got $25 a month, he had heard. “But. Lord have mercy, that was money then,” he said.
In 1905 Bob Pullen’s mother got sick and he was kept home from school to take eare of her. She died a year later but he never returned to the little school in town.
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