By George Evans Taylor, Jr
By George Evans Taylor, Jr
Cooper School is gone but not forgotten, I have fond memories of attending there for four and a half years. I started to school there in 1939 while in the second grade after my family moved from Princeton Arkansas. That was really something for me because at Princeton, for a year and a half, I had gone to school in a canning kitchen building! The Cooper school was for all of the local children in the first thru the sixth grade. The school building was white with a concrete foundation and brick trim. It had a concrete entrance porch, as you entered the main room the stage was to the right. Other than school desks the one large room contained the stage, a cloak room in which to hang our coats, store our lunch pails and our rubber overshoes. For heat it had a cast iron wood heater to burn the oak and hickory wood contracted for. Appointed older student fire monitors would arrive at school early to build a fire so the room would be warm when classes started. It has been known for students to put hollow volcanic sand rocks in the heater before the teacher arrived then they would explode about two hours after school started! The enrollment was about twenty to twenty-six students.
The teacher was Mrs. Eudora Fields, the only person who ever taught there as far as I know. She taught us the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. We also went on field trips; to real fields! She was a very good teacher and I loved her dearly. Her son Sanford Fields was the substitute teacher sometimes. She drove a 1937 black Chevrolet sedan. I don't recall ever seeing a car other than hers on the school ground!
There was no electricity or running water. We drank water from a dug well there on the south edge of the school yard. The well had a shelter over it, it had a bucket and rope with which to draw water. An appointed older student water monitor kept fresh, cool water in a bucket on a shelf at the well shelter (there was no ice). We each had our own cup, most were made of aluminum and, when pressed top to bottom, collapsed into a small height unit. Since there was no running water there was no rest room. We used the outhouse behind the school to take care of those necessary tasks. One halloween some older local boys moved the outhouse from it's onehole concrete foundation and men from Malvern had to come and make repairs!
We had school plays on the stage. Also the teacher, in season, would place a Christmas tree on the stage. One Christmas she brought, along with the Christmas tree, some six volt Christmas tree lights and a six volt car battery (all cars used six volt batteries then). She asked me to be her electrician and hook everything up. I did, and guess what? Years later I became an Electrical Engineer! (Teachers you do have an impact on your students!)
Before school and during recess the boys, girls and Mrs Fields played baseball (with a rubber ball for safety) and sometimes played hide and seek. The boys also rode stick horses and rode small trees down. One morning, I am not proud to report, the teacher caught some of us boys under the schoolhouse smoking rabbit tobacco. We had gone under the building as far as we could and, not thinking, we had stopped near a vent at the school entrance. The teacher smelled the smoke when she started into the schoolhouse. That was the last time for that sort of thing!
I walked about one and a half miles each way to school, rain or shine, hot or cold. I had to cross a creek near my house on a foot log that my dad (George Evans Taylor) had put there for that purpose. All of the students walked to school even if the teacher passed in front of their house, that was school policy. Sometimes when the clay road was real muddy some of us would walk home on the nearby high and dry railroad tracks which were behind (north of) the school. Several fast passenger trains and slower freight trains used those tracks each day headed for or leaving the Butterfield train depot. We could hear the train coming before we could see it so we would quickly find a place to move away from the tracks to the ditch below. There was a race at times, I still have a lot of respect for those black, snorting, iron monsters. Once Mrs Fields walked with all of us students to within sight of the railroad tracks at noon to view a fast passenger train as it went by. One of the rail cars was colorfully decorated as befitted a patriot, she said it carried General John J. Perishing of World War One fame. We all waved altho we didn't see him.
Each student carried a lunch, usually in a one gallon tin bucket. My bucket would sometimes contain a sugar and butter biscuit, ham biscuit, baked sweet potato, cornbread, cookies, etc that my dear mom (Gladys A. Ennis Taylor) prepared for me. A hot basic lunch of white (Navy) beans was served two or three days each week. They were cooked on a wood burning stove in a cast iron pot by "Miss Annie" who lived across the road from the school. It took two appointed older students to carry that hot pot from her house to the school house. A piece of tree limb was put thru the pot's bail and a student got on each side and carried the weight by holding onto the limb. Was this some of the first hot school lunches?
For several years we helped Mrs Fields collect large rocks. She was building a rock fence in front of her house. I lived on a rocky hill on the Old Military Road near the intersection of the Butterfield road. This was on her way home from school and each thursday the students that lived in that direction would walk from school, meet there and collect rocks. Mrs Fields was always already there in her car, we would load the rocks into the car trunk. That Chevy sure set low in the rear! She paid us ten cents each for each thursday we helped her.
Mrs Fields lived in North Malvern. Later a school was built across the street from her house. It was named the Fields Elementary School in her honor. She also served as Principal there for many years. After I moved to Alabama I visited my dear retired teacher several times. She was always glad to see me and my wife (Betty Sue Tillery Taylor) and two children (Terry D. Taylor and Teresa K. Taylor Toler). As we talked we stood near the fence she and her family built from those rocks removed from my rocky hill. That rock fence still stands, as does "my" rocky hill! By the way, there are still plenty of rocks on that rocky hill, I am convinced that rocks grow there!
My three sisters (Pauline Taylor Guyse, Wilma Taylor Huckelby and Dorothy Taylor Hobbs) were older than me therefore they never attended Cooper School. When I started in the seventh grade I attended Malvern High School. I got to ride the school bus! Each school bus made two routes each morning and each evening. They ran the shortest route last in the morning and first in the afternoon therefore I was on the way to school very early in the morning and home from school late in the afternoon. At least I didn't have to walk .
But that's another story!
The Cooper school was located about five miles north of Malvern, about two miles east of the Old Military Road. It was on top of the first large hill east of Cooper Graveyard (where my parents are buried) hill. (This being the first hill west of the Cooper Church.) When there the building sat on top of the hill about one hundred yards off to the north of the road. Relative to the school site Malvern was to the south. The towns of Butterfield and Magnet Cove were to the west. Glenrose was to the north-east.
The school building has been gone many years.
In 1997 I drove to the area but there are now several houses where I once played baseball.
I could not go to the school site.
I will hold many fond Cooper School memories as long as I live. Now I ask you, were those the good old days?
By: George Evans Taylor, Jr (Feb 21, 1998)
209 Lakeshore Drive
Muscle Shoals, Alabama 35661-1029
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