This business of taking your lunch to school had advantages that we had never dreamed of. You started in on your lunch at the morning recess.
The School lunch pail
An Excerpt from Life at a North Woods Lumber Camp
This business of taking your lunch to school had advantages that we had never dreamed of. Each pupil had a nail, driven into the wall, for holding his hat and coat, in such months as he wore them, and on it he managed to hang his dinner pail as well. You started in on your lunch at the morning recess. The early class in reading had taken a lot out of you, and your waning strength would have to be reinforced by one of the two hard-boiled eggs, and maybe a slice of bread and butter.
At noon you and Nora would sit at the end of the stoop and compare notes on the viands your respective mothers had fixed up. And maybe you traded half of your pie for a go at her cake.
In spring, at the right time, should spring ever show up, you would get Mother to put a cup in the pail, with sugar in the bottom. You started for school a half hour early and planned a descent upon a patch of wild strawberries you had stumbled into the day before.
A lunch pail filled so lavishly with sweet things as yours would have the disadvantage of being a great drawer of ants. You would mention the menace of ants to Mother, and she would take it up with the folks in Shepherd who sold pails. Relief never came from any source, a fact that mattered not at all. The berries, to my taste, were just as nice when you had picked off the ants as they would have been before becoming anted.
Courtesy of Dorothy Payton
Author Tom O’Donnell, who in his early life in the 1880s, acquired considerable lumbering and river-driving understanding in Michigan’s northern woods.
After lunch, and before school was called for the afternoon session, you would have with the others a whirl at pom-pom-pull-away, or hide-and-seek, and maybe Miss Sweeting would let you wash the blackboard and slates. And if somebody had beaten you to that you might be permitted to pull the long bell rope that came from the belfry through an augur hole bored through the ceiling, thus bringing the rest of the kids tearing in for the afternoon exercises.
All this, what with staying nights after school, made me practically a denizen of the schoolroom. Completely overwhelmed by the glamour of the new furnishings, I determined never to leave, and Mother declared that the way I was headed I would make it. Nights after school I flatly refused to go home. I was aided in my determinations by the vigilance of Miss Sweeting, who, the first afternoon, caught me in the act of clipping True Hodgins on the ear with my ruler. For this I was penalized by being kept after school for a full half hour. What with washing the blackboard and sweeping the floor, the time passed so quickly that I asked Miss Sweeting if I might not stay on for another half hour. With a remark that the punishment was hurting her more than it did me, she said yes, but be sure to come home in time for supper.
“Fred will bring it to me, I betcha!” I declared.
Immediately I set out upon a series of investigations during which I practically wore out the wall maps, first pulling down the one dealing with North America and, after admiring ecstatically the beautiful colors, I turned to wondering where Michigan was. I finally located it in the general region of Athabasca.