By Dr. Bruce Smith ——Bio and Archives--May 12, 2024

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Nearly sixty years later, it remains one of the proudest moments of my life.

For three years I attended the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades at a rural junior high school. It was a remnant of the old days before school consolidation because it had been constructed as a grade K-12 school in the 1930s. Not long before I arrived the high school had been consolidated with the main high school in Richmond six miles away, so that only the three junior high grades remained.

It was two brick buildings, two stories each, with no elevators and no air conditioning. There was a small detached gym with a modest stage along with a detached mechanical arts building where the shop classes were taught. There was an adjacent football field with a baseball backstop in the far corner. There were locker rooms and a cafeteria and kitchen. This school was in the tiny crossroads town of Boston, Indiana, a town with only a flasher light at the center. This sturdy school in a flat part of the heartland was the center of my world when I was aged thirteen through fifteen.

The first year was pretty bewildering. Seventh grade was my first experience outside of an elementary school where we stayed with the same teacher all day. Here at Boston Junior High we were assigned homerooms, then went to different classrooms all day for subjects like math, history, phys ed, music, English, science, Latin, agriculture, shop, home economics, etc. My homeroom teacher was the home economics teacher, Mrs. Wright. She was strict, but kindly, and she presided over a classroom of sewing tables with kitchen ranges and other appliances (but no microwaves!) scattered around the periphery of the rooms. These tables were often strewn with pins, needles, thread, scissors, rulers, and other tools which provided many opportunities for mischief to us boys in the room. That’s another story. I eventually fell into the routine of moving from class to class, dreading the math class with my whole being each day of every school year. By the time a year had passed, I was an old junior high pro, but still intimidated by the older kids. I had made some friends among the other rural and farm kids who lived all across the township. They were a bit rough sometimes but they brought me a salad of salty language which shaped my wit as the third of three brothers. We were pretty rowdy without being destructive, but we all had senses of humor and understood irony. It made for mostly happy days, if one had to spend them in a school.

Summer after seventh grade was another in the agreeable routine that accompanied our semi-rural home. There were five acres of moraine with woods and marsh and a little spring-fed creek for my enjoyment. I learned to use an axe there, camped, caught crawdads and hatched frog eggs, and enjoyed the solitude, particularly after the summer of 1965. I could read all day or doze in a tree house listening to Cincinnati Reds games. I nearly deafened myself one day........

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