Childhood Memories along Cooper's Main Street
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Patty Mack and Kathy Paulsen see the Town
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Dianne recalls
Little memory wisps tug at me as I read the recollections of Cathy, Dave, Ell and others. I was one of the “country kids” who didn’t join the “city” schools until I climbed on a bus to enter junior high at the same stone, two-story school my mother graduated from. There wood floors creaked under the influx of new students from the rural consolidation. Besides my fellow classmate at Tyrol Township # 3, Becky Heinz, Marcia Retzlaff, Cheryl Ott, Linda Urness, Sylvia Ericson, Cheryl Thompson, and many others sensed a common bond as we got to know the “town kids.” I felt an advantage having gotten to know many of my classmates from Sunday School at Trinity Lutheran.
I remember that the principal at the old school still had a paddle hanging on his wall—and he used it, I heard! I remember pep rallies in the big, or so it seemed to me, study hall where wooden double desks were bolted together. Rarely did we underling seventh graders get to sit,though, but we huddled around the outside of the room. I was impressed that Judy Fritz, who had gone to my rural school, was a cheerleader at the time. I remember Mr. Bjertness, the good-natured, rotund social sciences teacher; Mr. Hildebrandt, whose wife my first-grade brother was in love with; and Mr. Johnson whose small, wiry frame always seemed to be in motion as he taught science.
Prior to all that, I’d attended a rural school 7 miles northwest of Cooperstown. The building is still there (my home farm a half mile away isn’t) with chalkboards, cloakroom, and “back room” off of which the bathrooms opened looking much as they were when four of us began first grade to share the space with 17 other students. Memories of pony rides at recess and spontaneous “We’re having school outside” announcements given to a teacher who didn’t have much discipline… flood my mind. But this is the story of Cooperstown, primarily a place to buy groceries and to go to church on Sunday during those early years. I do remember occasional Saturday nights in town when queues of neighbors chatted under street lights that cast a mysterious hue on everything and made our blue car look purple. I remember going into Larsons’ Store and watching clerks sweep sawdust over the old wood floors and peering into oak-trimmed glass cases.
The first two movies I ever saw at the Strand Theater as a pre-schooler were with my parents. One was The Ten Commandments and the other was Come Back, Little Sheba. My mother felt badly for years that they took me to the latter, and the few times she and my father went out to a movie after that, they got a sitter.
I remember when the hotel burned. Prior to that, my grandfather often joined his cronies in the double row of lobby chairs smoking cigars. Sometimes on Sunday my parents and I would meet my aunt and uncle from Finley for dinner there. I vaguely remember linen tablecloths and roast beef dinners. After the hotel burned, our Sunday ritual was far less formal and often meant stopping at Stone’s Café for the newspaper, which wasn’t delivered in the country on Sundays, and Nellie Stone would shuffle out from the back in her hairnet and apron to dig out some butter brickle ice cream, my dad’s favorite, for us to buy and take home.
I remember the original white wood-framed Trinity Lutheran Church. It had a huge mural above the altar of Jesus reaching out to Peter sinking in the water. Every Sunday morning the service would start with the robed choir solemnly filing down the center aisle singing “Let all the earth keep silent” which was my mother’s goal for me during church. She had perfected the “look” that enforced silence. When it was time for me to start Sunday School at age 4, I was too scared to stay by myself, so I remember my father hunkering down in a kiddie chair that first day with me. I’ve always appreciated that. That same year I remember racing downstairs after the Sunday School Christmas programwith my traditional sack of sticky hard candy stuck to various nuts in the shell when the sack tore and candy tumbled all down the stairs. I was inconsolable. I’m not sure why because I never really liked the candy, but I wanted it nevertheless.
Summertime meant swimming lessons. Invariably I’d catch cold and develop an ear infection in the frigid water of early June morning lessons, so I’d have to stay home a day or two, and I’d come back having missed the lessons on perfecting strokes or treading water. Once I’d remove the glasses I had to wear from second grade on, I couldn’t even tell which person was the instructor, so needless to say, I experienced some panicky times, and actually learning to swim came later, primarily on my own.
I have better summer memories of the library down under the bank. Cool on hot summer afternoons, the smell of a library still strikes a note of contentment for me.
One summer on my birthday I remember my dad driving my friend Becky, my mom, and me to the train depot in Hannaford so that we could ride the train back to Cooperstown where he picked us up. I think the seats had wooden backs.
The memory bank has been primed; I could go on and on, but this exercise reminds me how grateful I am for the innocence of Cooperstown in the ‘50’s and early ‘60’s.