Now & Then | The old school lunch room revisited

— I’ve become very interested in the old building on the downtown school campus which used to be our Pea Ridge school lunch room. The white building stands just off Yates Street, several yards east from the north end of Curtis Avenue. In recent years it has served the S.E.E.K. program, Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge.

My understanding is that the school administration and School Board have decided to retire the building and will no longer use it for school activities and programs.

I’m greatly hoping that the community will find other beneficial uses for this building, perhaps as a meeting place for civic groups, historical displays and so on. It is by far the oldest building now standing on the downtown school campus, having been built in the early 1900s. Its concrete building blocks are like those used in the old Tetrick building on East Pickens, which now serves as our City Hall, mayor’s office and courtroom and also quite like those used to build the 1911 Bank of Pea Ridge building which now houses the Community Library. I think the white block building must have served as the school lunch room until the new elementary school buildings went up in about 1971.

I have been told that when first built, this block building was first used as a vocational agriculture center and that practical trades like carpentry were taught as well as principles of farming. That would have been in the later days of the old Pea Ridge Masonic College, from about 1905 through 1916. The college ceased operations in 1916and the campus was turned over to the public school district. The old college building itself was home to the Pea Ridge public school until 1930, when it was torn down to make way for the one-story red brick school building where so many of us (Pea Ridgers) went to school. The red brick building, along with its expansion wings from the late 1940s and early 1950s, served Pea Ridge Schools until 2000, when the new high school was opened on West Pickens.

I first knew the white building near the old, old school gym as our “Hot Lunch Room.” I think the federal hot lunch program began in the mid-1940s, as World War II was ending.

Before then, many or most school kids brought their lunch to school from home. Lunch pails of various designs were very common back then. Some children ate pretty well from their lunch pails, but many were not well nourished.

I remember that on my first day at school, my family was uncertain if there would be a “hot lunch,” so I carried a lunch with me on the bus. The other kids told me that for sure there would be a hot lunch, so I hid my lunch wrap under the bus seat. I was kind of embarrassed by the whole thing, I’m not sure why. Not everybody ate in the hot lunch room. I remember that in class every morning, someone would pop in the door to take the lunch count. I think we paid 25 cents a day. It was good food, at least for kids who were willing to eat a good meal. Sometimes though, kids would go to Armstrong’s Cafe or across to Taylor’s Cafe, where we could get a fair meal for 15 to 25 cents.

When we were in about the eighth grade, some of us boys discovered that if we waited at the north door of the school library, we could get a head start on everyone else in getting to the lunch room. As soon as Claud Lindsey sounded the first peal of the lunch bell, we would charge off the little porch at full speed and make a mad dash to be first to the lunch room door. It worked great for weeks, except that one day, after we had entered the lunch room and were eating, our teacher, Herb Dixon, informedabout six of us that as soon as lunch was over we were to meet him on the stage in the school auditorium. He showed up with a hide-tanner-type paddle, proceeded to tan ours to a rosy shade and allowed as to how we shouldn’t orta do that any more. He was pretty persuasive, as I recall.

My memory is fuzzy about the cooks who prepared those hot lunches for us. The names I can come up with were Phoebe McGinnis, Gladys Doke, Ruth Woods, Esther Hall and, in later years, Madge Jones, Winton Wilkerson and Judy Pheiffer. Some of the school girls helped by waiting tables, cleaning up, putting silverware and lunch trays to soak, washing milk bottles and so on.

That included Yvonne McGinnis, Winnie Mae Hall, Beatrice Wilkerson, JoAnn Easley, Peggy Patterson, Betty Patterson and later on, Marilyn Greene, Nancy Patton and others.

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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history.

He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.

Community, Pages 5 on 02/02/2011