Testify that I am Old.......

The box camera was hard to use.  If the photographer could see any image they would push down on the side button and take the shot.  The sliding of the button down would actually cause the box camera to lean. The photos I share today will not be edited to sit right with the world.

 To date my age I have been to this school house many times as a young boy.   I did not attend there as I was too young.  My three brothers did attend there.   I like seeing the American flag flying and also the bell tower with the school bell.  A wood burning stove would be the heating system and the shed out back held the wood and buckets for carrying water.  The outhouses didn't require a water system.  My brothers quit going to this school in 1954.  My parents were renting land to the back and left of this house way over the hill.  When they moved to the newly purchased farm in 1953 the brothers finished school here.  I am betting the school was shut down just a few years later.  I know of schools near our area that were in a different township that shut the country school in 1956.

I remember attending a Christmas party at the school when young and seeing bubble lights on the tree.  They did have electricity in the building.  I would wait,sitting on a running board of a car for the brothers to get out of school. Why I have the memory of sitting on the running board and running down into the ditch and then back again I really don't know.

To add to the slanted photo collection is this photo.  It is a school that was built in Murray, Iowa.  The town of Murray is directly north on the same road that the country school sat.  I don't know the number of miles but it is in the very next township north of the Doyle township that you saw above. The school had a short life as it burned down in 1925.  The school they built to replace this is the one my brothers and I attended.

This older barbershop scene is in Murray, Iowa. I use to walk past here in the 50's and 60's and see at least one barber in here still giving haircuts. I am thinking this photo was taken in the 40's.   I remember seeing these empty chairs for years as when the business closed it sat as a barbershop for quite a few years.

The barbershop sat in the left corner of this building.  The photo here is of main street Murray and at the time the photo was taken the building was a car dealership selling Model T Fords.  My Uncle Carl eventiually bought this building and it became the barbershop, in the first section, an apartment for my Uncle and Aunt in the second section, with the door as the entry.  The third section was the barbershop that I had my haricuts,  The last section was a cafe for quite a few years then became a laundry mat.

When my Uncle died in the 80's the building was sold and used as a car repair business in the back.  The owners let the roof's go, didn't repair them, and the roof collapsed  causing the whole building to be removed.  One can still see the different floors of all the rooms today as they didn't remove the foundation of the building.

I inherited a 1956 atlas from my parents of the Clarke County area.  The maps of each of the nine townships are marked with landowner's names identified, hand written, on the map.  The country schools in our area including the Doyle # 9 country school were still on the map at that time.

The atlas was made when I was six years old. I am going to glean a lot of history from it as I dig deeper in the different parts of the county and townships.  The country schools are all marked on the maps with a dark square box with a symbol of at flag sticking out of it.  That will be another whole blog to write as I see how they were the institutions that educated most of rural Iowans at the time.

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