Childhood Memories: Zion Lutheran School

This is the third in a series on my Childhood Memories, written especially for my children and grandchildren.

My first eight years of schooling were at the two room parochial school named Zion Lutheran School of Walburg. As its name indicates, it was a parish school. As such it had three distinct aims: to teach the Christian Lutheran faith to the children who had been baptized as infants in Zion congregation, to help preserve the best of the Lutheran German heritage and thirdly to prepare its students for productive citizenship in the USA. And in my judgment it achieved all three goals in an outstanding way.

Teaching the faith was primary and the methods were traditional. Tell the Bible stories, ask the questions of the Catechism and get the correct centuries-old answers, and memorize the “proof texts, the hymns, prayer and Martin Luther’s Small Catechism. Up until my graduation in 1941 these were all learned and taught in German!

We were taught to read the old fashioned way-pure phonics. Io can still see the wall charts. I remember the primer and “I am   the gingerbread man; I am. I am." We had no library and no access to a public one. When I was in the seventh grade we (rejoice greatly) received a set of 38 condensed versions of children’s classic books. Mt only regret: I had read them all in the first two weeks after they arrived. But then we got a set of World Book Encyclopedia. As diligently as I read I never finished that!

Writing was just penmanship-no essays, books reports or creative writing Spelling was a separate class. But grammar was paramount. We diagramed sentences and I can still put it all down: subject, predicate, object, adjective, adverbs, subjunctive clauses, the whole bit.

History was as much Texas history as US history. At one point I tried to memorize the names of all 52 counties in Texas and their county seats-but, of course, that was all secondary to the Alamo and the San Jacinto Monument!

I don't remember any science course. Yet my father, Principal Kieschnick, wanted his students to have new learnings. I am sure that neither I nor any of my classmates had ever been to a zoo or an aquarium. Once he contracted with a gentleman who brought a mature elephant to our school. As the elephant walked around our playground we felt its trunk - and a few students even rode it. Another time a large preserved full-sized whale was brought to the school. We felt its skin and marveled a how whalebones could be shaped into useful objects. 

Two classrooms (grades 1-3 and 4-8.) Teachers Bleke and Kieschnick Outside of my piano//organ and one high school teacher of Spanish, I had not one single female teacher from grade one through grad school!

Discipline seemed strict and fair with spanking being an option utilized only “when very necessary.”…We drank water drawn from the school well and dispensed in little tin cups of each student. Lunch came in sacks-except for mine as I lived close enough to school to always go home for lunch. No school busses and in the early years some classmates rode to school on their horses or in buggies drawn by horses. There was a place for the horses to rest and be fed, just next to the outdoors hole-in-the –ground toilet for boys. In winter the boys got coals from an outside bin an h kept the pot-bellied stove stoked.

We had plenty of fun. Recesses time was generous. We chose up sides and played softball. At other times we “shot marbles” played “red rover" and “andy over.” Christmas was time for wonderful Christmas programs in church on Christmas Eve where we each received a brown paper bag with goodies-the one time in the year when I had a stick of gum and an orange just for myself, and some red and white Christmas candy! End of the year school picnics were time for the oompah band, softball games, ice cream scones, and a “program” with candidates for public office in the 1930’s assuring us they were against “child labor laws” which allegedly might prohibit parents from sending their own children into the fields to pick cotton!

My memories now are all positive. For its time the school was perfect for me. Today is a new day and I am glad my grandchildren have so much more than I had. And I look with dismay at the many in our country and in our world who would be so blessed to have the simple lessons and eternal values which were taught me at Zion Lutheran School in Walburg, Texas.