Education: Reunion in Montana

The same rouged portraits of Lincoln and Washington clung to the walls, the same brass bell dominated the teacher’s desk, the same science case held birds’ nests and pickled fish. And in a one-room schoolhouse in the lower Flathead River Valley of northern Montana, Retired Teacher Lucy Blachly, still sharp and saucy at 78, smiled through swells of emotion and apologized to her greying former students—all of whom she remembered by name—for how she had treated them 60 years ago. “I do hope that none of you bears me ill will for being such a strict teacher,” she said. “I really loved you all.”

To celebrate the 63rd anniversary of the opening of the Rousselle country school, 75 of its oldtime pupils showed up this month for a weekend of reunion and reminiscence—and celebration of a kind of education that is vanishing from the American scene. Lucy Blachly (now Mrs. Ernest F. Smith of Chico, Calif.) and the school’s first teacher, Norine McDonell, 82 (now Mrs. Roman Zeller of nearby Kalis-pell), recalled how farmers petitioned the county to open the school in 1904 for the valley’s 26 children, including year-old baby Alma McClarty and Henry Dietrich, 19. They even built a barn for Adla Oldenburg’s spotted riding horse, since she was too “delicate” a girl to walk the three miles to school.

Hissing Geese. Lucy Blachly, who landed the $40-a-month job at the school in 1907 when she was only 17, paid $15 a month for an unheated room at the McClarty farmhouse, hiked li miles to school each morning through snow or mud with two of her pupils, Homer and Percy McClarty. The three clung together for mutual comfort: she feared the farmyard geese that “hissed and nipped at my legs above my buttoned boots”; they feared the somber Blackfeet Indians, who fished in the Flathead River. The trio hurried along, since before every class Miss Blachly had to put all the lessons on the blackboard in her neat, round Palmer script for the students to copy—no one had a textbook.

Progress was slow, since the older boys were excused for harvesting in fall, planting in spring, and boys of all ages took a “potato vacation.” Girls stayed home to help their mothers through a pregnancy or the canning season. Yet even though the potbellied stove never quite coped with the Montana winters, only temperatures under 45° below could close the school. “I felt as if each day in school was precious to the children,” Miss Blachly recalls, “and that I must fill it to the brim,” since a few months each winter was “all the education they were going to get before taking up their adult lives.”

Looking back, Jeannette Kleinhans Lussier, 64, recalls most fondly the “wonderful times” playing games at lunch time, such as Last Man Out, run sheep run, Pom-Pom-Pullaway, red rover and, after the first snow, fox and geese. Homer McClarty, now an affluent well driller in Kalispell, still boasts of how his “big yellow dog Snipe” attended school with him every day for seven years, huddled close to the stove with the kids on the worst days and really deserved “a graduation certificate.”

Despite a declining population in the area, Flathead Valley’s farmers have sacrificed to keep the Rousselle School going. When the school dropped below the legal minimum of nine full-time students last year and failed to qualify for state aid, residents of the district simply voted a hike in their property tax to meet the budget of $5,631.

Reading & Writing. The building itself has changed little, although it has indoor toilets and an oil furnace now, plus a “teacherage” (a small apartment in which the resident teacher can stay overnight when roads get rough). This year a traveling teacher will stop by periodically to provide art and music instruction, as well as a van with tape recorders and an overhead projector to improve science lessons. Otherwise, the curriculum is much the same as it was when Lucy Blachly arrived in 1907: reading, writing and arithmetic, spelling, grammar and penmanship.

None of Rousselle’s graduates have gone on to fame or fortune, yet by and large they look back at their school days with a measure of pride and satisfaction. “There were lots of things we missed, but lots we gained,” said Alumna Sara Kleinhans Fine. “If a teacher had grace and manners, she passed this on to the boys and girls in her school. You learned according to the quality of the teacher.” Besides, she added, Rousselle offered its innocent students an intangible gift that today’s crowded, businesslike urban school finds hard to emulate: “The country school allowed you to be a child a little longer.”