Until well into the 20th century, many Iowans still attended rural schools. It’s not surprising considering that at one time almost 14,000 one-room schools were spread across the state. My parents both went to rural schools through the eighth grade. In fact, my mother attended the same rural school that her father and grandfather before her had attended. She, my mother, always told us that there were great teachers and lasting lessons in those small wooden structures.
   She recently heard a story from another rural school alum who, after many years, recalled a lesson he learned in his own country schoolhouse from a first-grade teacher.

Walter’s story

   I started kindergarten in a rural school with a male teacher.  He really never spent a lot of time interacting with the students. But in first grade we had a female teacher who spent time with us socially and outside with us at recess.  One recess there was a lot of smoke pouring out the boys outdoor toilet (fyi –rural schools had great teachers but no indoor plumbing). There were too many boys in there or I might have tried to go in, too.   The teacher went over, opened the door, and instructed everyone go back into the schoolhouse. So we did.
   We all sat down in our seats.  She explained to us the importance of following the rules and being responsible citizens.  She did it in such a way that it was a life lesson and has always remained with me.  I have always been grateful to her for her caring and concern for her students.

   My dad may have the record for most years as a Belle Plaine driving instructor, but he was not the first Belle Plaine teacher to bravely sit behind the wheel with classes of student drivers. Dean Carl, a Belle Plaine Community Schools graduate who was through school by the time my father came to town, learned to drive from one of the instructors who preceded my dad. The teacher’s name was Les Deaton, and Mr. Carl still remembers the lessons he learned in Deaton’s drivers ed classes:

   "It was I believe, in my sophomore year in the early ‘50’s, and I was taking drivers training. Les Deaton was my drivers training instructor. The car we drove in had a straight stick, so there was housing covering the transmission. The housing, or transmission tunnel, came up to the gear shift (check Google for images to see what these transmission tunnels looked like).
   "Our drivers training teacher set a glass milk bottle (all milk bottles were glass at that time) on the transmission. If anyone turned a corner too fast or stopped too quickly and, as a result, tipped over the glass milk bottle, they were required to put a quarter into the bottle. At the end of the driving year, all money collected in the glass milk bottle was used to buy food and drink so we—the drivers ed students—could celebrate. 
   "When I was taking drivers ed, I never carried any quarters because I didn’t have any. The milk bottle made me be a more careful driver then and even today. At the end of the term, there was probably $5.00 in the bottle. Everyone got to be involved in the party.  Of course, back then pop was  5 cents a bottle."  

   Steve Mansfield owns and operates the historic King Theater on Belle Plaine’s Main Street (I would call the theater majestic and historic—because it is—but I don’t want to sound dramatic), and of course, he grew up in Belle Plaine and attended Belle Plaine Schools. He had classes with most of the same teachers my siblings and I, including Mrs. Peg Wilkinson (whose husband was Belle Plaine’s much-loved and highly successful track coach, Harold Wilkinson).
   Over lunch at the Community Center the other day, Steve told my mom a favorite story about taking a class with Mrs. Wilkinson, and the story is another example of how a teacher very quietly made a lasting impact on a student—so much so that he still speaks of it 40+ years later. His story is this:

   “When I was a senior in high school, I took Art 1 from Mrs. Wilkinson.  I was the only entry-level art student in the class.  Everyone else was an advanced student. 
   “There came a time that Mrs. Wilkinson told the class that they needed to enter something in the county art fair at Vinton. For weeks, the students worked meticulously on their projects for the fair.  I thought the fair was only for the advanced art students, so didn't work on a project. 
   “On the day of the fair, Mrs. Wilkinson asked me to hand in my entry.  I grabbed a piece of paper and some chalk and drew a simple house with windows and a chimney and some green grass and a tree.  It took about ten minutes and was entered in the "chalk drawing" category.
   “I found out the next day that it had won first place. There were only two entries in the chalk category. I always wondered what the other entry look like. They really didn't have to put my picture in the local paper for this victory.” 

   Steve is modest about the drawing he submitted the chalk category win, but the truth is that he had no idea when he drew the picture how many entries he would compete against, and while he might not have put much time into his chalk art, I am sure he learned from Mrs. Wilkinson over that semester and applied the lessons to his picture. Then he followed the teacher’s instructions, and he won a prize. 

   My mother first told me a story in my childhood that she has repeated off and on over the years—probably when she thought I most needed it. This story of hers has the element a great narrative needs: a caring and insightful protagonist, suspense, pathos, and a happy ending. The story is about her favorite high school coach and teacher, who just happened to be my father and the story’s protagonist.
   Her story, I think, shows why my dad was a great teacher, but even if the protagonist weren’t my dad, it would still be a great story about teaching, coaching, and fairness. Here’s the story.

   My mother was a committed member of the girls’ softball team and my dad—her future husband—was the coach. He was also the principal and taught economics and history, along with several other subjects at their very small school (so small, in fact, there was no indoor plumbing).  
   Their small-school team was hot during the early 1950s and, in my mother’s senior year, they had had a particularly stellar season, winning several tournaments. The school and the town knew the team was headed straight for the sectionals. No surprise then that excitement bubbled around their last home game of the season. My mom was the team’s catcher, and one of her closest friends played third base. Everyone was at top performance that game, determined to win, knowing triumph that day meant going forward to the sectionals and team glory!
   In the last inning, the game was desperately close. The opposing team’s star player jogged up to bat with bases loaded.  She swung hard and hit a fly to left field, threw down her bat, and ran like hell toward first base—just as  all her teammates took off from their bases and raced around the diamond. At the same time, the left fielder on my mom’s team ran to snatch up the ball and throw it straight to third base where my mom’s best friend waited. She knew the pressure was on. She jumped and stretched her arm as far as it would go. . . and missed the ball. The star player and her teammates finished their mad race around the baseball field and each one slid dramatically home! They’d won. Damn.
   As everyone left the field that day, many of the girls on my mom’s team made snide and often downright mean remarks about how my mom’s friend had lost the game because she hadn’t caught the ball to tag the runner.  They said it was all her fault they weren’t going to sectionals. My mom’s friend was hurt, she was crushed—she was ostracized. Everyone blamed her for the loss. My mom saw tears in her eyes.
   My dad must have too. He didn’t say anything to the team at the game, but the next day at school, he took time out of their economics class to revisit the game and make sure they understood what it meant to be a team. As he gathered them together, he told them—without raising his voice, “You all played a great game. That doesn’t mean we all didn’t make errors all during the game—you, the players, and me, the coach. Every one of us.” Then he described a few fumbles and missed opportunities, strike outs, and talked about how if any one of those errors hadn’t happened, they would have been ahead and the outcome of the game would have changed. “One person,” he concluded, “did not lose the game.  All of those errors, all of us together—as a team—lost the game.” 

   Here is one of Dad’s stories about being mobilized for World War II. It tells about his leaving Iowa and heading south to Louisiana for training that was pretty basic. The story ends with an anecdote about a motorcycle. Dad had ridden Harley Davidsons for years:

   I was in the National Guard, and we were mobilized February 10, 1941. I left Iowa for Camp Claiborne, LA, on a train left over from WWI that had signs at the windows saying, “Don’t shoot buffalo from the window.”  When we got to Camp Claiborne, our barracks were square shaped tents with four bunks in each. 
   We had training every day.  They woke us every morning to 40 minutes of exercises, then breakfast, then regular army training.  We hiked nearly every day, sometimes with full packs on our backs, and we took our rifles everywhere.  We had Springfield bolt action rifles, left over from WWI. Later overseas, we got new M1 Garand rifles. 
   Sometimes at Camp Claiborne, we had practice air raids. Planes flew over and dropped bags of flour for bombs, and afterwards officers would check what places had flour on them and know they had a hit where the flour was. We didn’t have real tanks for those maneuvers: we just had trucks with the sign “tank” on each one.  So if one was hit by flour, we knew it was bombed. 
   We did have motorcycles, though, in the message center.  I delivered messages by motorcycle there and all through the war.  Once I was supposed to give a colonel a ride in a sidecar.  I’d never had a sidecar attached and I drove the car up a guide wire, spilling the car and the colonel.  He got up, helped me right the bike and sidecar, jumped back in and said, “Let’s go, and stay away from guide wires.”

 

    Dad’s time in the classroom and in the drivers education car eventually inspired more than visits and hugs from people whose lives he touched during those years. Recently, my family and several hundred of his former students and colleagues wrote up memories and anecdotes and drew illustrations to create a book, Park It!, that tells the story of his teaching career. My father’s students who contributed these stories represent four decades and several generations, generations that went from the McCarthy Era to the Vietnam War to the Watergate Scandal, from the beginning of the space age to the advent of personal computers. Yet consistently, whether in Dad’s class in the 1950s or the 1980s, what students remembered most fondly or valued most about him remained consistent across the years: his astonishing ability to be fair, consistent, principled, and calm.
    And no doubt also, at one level or another, Dad always demonstrated to students that he cared about them, their education, and their lives. He didn’t stop caring either when he stopped teaching. Until he was 85 he volunteered in the local schools, and until he was 90 he volunteered at a nearby Veterans Hospital. All his life he remained what he never deliberately set out to be—to paraphrase one of the book contributors, the model of what a husband, father, teacher, and man should be.


Park It! is available as an e-book at Amazon.com and as a paperback at parkitvirtualmuseum.com.

It seems appropriate to post another installment of my father’s story on Father’s Day, since he was such a great father.
      Dad’s sterling qualities—being fair, consistent, principled, and calm—and his excellence as a teacher were always obvious to us, his family. Just how profound his impact on students had been over the years started becoming obvious to all even before he retired in 1981. By then, he was receiving letters, gifts, and visits from former students. It was not unusual to have people stop him in public or come to the house to see him and hug or kiss him, even though they sometimes hadn’t seen him in decades. And that remained true for the rest of his life. Once, a few years ago, he and my mother invited my sister and me to Sunday service at a local church, not their own, to see a group of European musicians perform. The church’s lay deacon was one of my father’s former students, and it was she who introduced and welcomed the visiting quartet—but only after expressing at length how wonderful it was to see Mr. Winkie among the congregation.

    Luckily for Dad, he cared not one bit that he wasn’t the most popular on staff and didn’t always have the top evaluations. Throughout his career, he did what he thought was right and did not concern himself too much with the opinions of others. Not that he ignored feedback. He was more than willing to follow constructive criticism. In one of his early years in Belle Plaine, Dad received an evaluation that advised he needed to stop jingling change in his pocket. He immediately bought a small coin holder and refrained from putting his hands in his pockets for the next two or three evaluation periods. The comment turned up on each subsequent evaluation even though it no longer applied, so Dad threw out the coin purse and resumed his habit of jingling change.
    Fortunately, he worked with only one administrator who copied evaluations from time-to-time and year-to-year. And fortunately, many students didn’t mind his approach to teaching. I think partly because they liked and learned from his stories, they liked expressing their opinions, and they must have known Dad practiced what he preached. He didn’t just, for example, lecture American ideals—he did his best to live up to them. So much so that once he and my mother were on an NBC Nightly News segment because during the Iran Hostage Crisis, they went door to door asking for signatures on a petition to help an Iranian family stay in the U.S. 

And as with his teaching career in general, the eventual status was somewhat ironic. For much of the time he was in the classroom, he was not among the most popular teachers. That distinction usually went to a younger, flashier set. My dad was in his late 30s when he first came to the town and was quiet and unassuming all the years he taught. He did not always get the best evaluations from administrators, either, and his teaching practices surely did not fit the ideal. He roamed the classroom, jingled change in his pocket, frequently told stories about his war experiences or his life during the depression, and threw out questions that sometimes had no answers or no “correct” answers. He demanded critical thinking. He would often veer from the textbook to lecture on topics like civil rights or bullying. He let students veer with him to debate topics of their choice—one day politics, another the existence of God. He did not take sides or pass judgment during these debates. He didn’t judge if students failed at a task or assignment, even though his expectations were high, and not just academically but in terms of behavior and demonstrating respect for each other. (Well, okay, he judged if someone did not treat others well, and he was not afraid to say so—quietly, but firmly.)