A Wonderful, Gentle, Teacher: The Professional and Personal Life of a Dedicated Rural Wisconsin Educator

By Melvin Zahn

"A Wonderful, Gentle Teacher" gives the reader a glimpse of rural life on a family farm in Northeastern Wisconsin in the early 1920's and 1930's. See life in rural Northeastern Wisconsin through the eyes of a young child, adolescent, young man, coach, experienced teacher, father and retired educator's eyes. Read about the physical setup, classroom environment, instructional techniques and responsibilities of the old "grade one through eight", one-room schools of the 1930's and 1940's. Learn what was required and expected of an upper-midwest prospective teacher as he prepared for and pursued a career as an educator in mid-20th century America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781452064222

Melvin Zahn

Melvin Zahn (1918-2007) was a 40 year veteran of rural school and small-town Wisconsin education from 1937-1981, except for the time during WWII. Melvin completed a high school affiliated teacher training program in 1937 and accepted the first of three consecutive teaching positions spanning 14 years in one room schools teaching grades one through eight. In 1950, he started work toward a Bachelor's Degree in Education. He earned this degree in 1958, attending eight consecutive years of summer school and weekend courses while teaching full-time. He completed a Masters Degree in Educational Administration in 1973, and started his Doctorate of Education. He was a K-12/elementary principal for the last eighteen years of his career. He married in 1946, and was the father of three. Melvin was a devoted educator who unselfishly gave his time and talents to students, their parents and the community. He constantly encouraged, supported and guided his students and staffs, and he had good relationships with parent communities, including families of Native Americans from Menominee Nation. Melvin was a talented artist who was encouraged to show his works of art, but never did. During his retirement he traveled extensively throughout the U.S. and abroad, visiting countries in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Mexico. He maintained his interest in education throughout retirement, observing instructional methods and styles in international schools. He also served his church and local community on various committees as president of the local AAL, board member for the Homme Home for the elderly, secretary of the Lions Club, president of the local Retired Teachers Association, election board for his home town, board member and vice-president of the local AARP chapter and a member of his local church council. Melvin finished his autobiography in January of 2007, just two months before he passed away.

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Contents

Early Childhood

Back To School Affairs

Responsibility

Recreation For The Family

Religion

High School Years

Post High School Years

First Teaching Position

The World War Ii Years

My Second Teaching Position (1946)

The Woman In My Life

A Sampling Of My Grade School Art

My Adult Life Art

The Zahn Branch Of The Family Tree

Tributes To Melvin Zahn

My Autobiography

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EARLY CHILDHOOD

The area of NORTHEASTERN Wisconsin where I grew up has a great deal of history. Early settlers were immigrants originating from the same area in Germany, an area called Regenwald, though after WWII it became part of Poland. Many of these newcomers were interrelated. They settled near a river where there was a huge forest, abounding with virgin white pine trees. Thus, this area became a rich area in the forest industry. Since there were no passable roads, the logs had to be floated down the river to an area in the larger cities where they were put on the market. In order to do this a dam was built to create a back water, and when the logs were ready for delivery the dam would be opened and the water would gush out, floating the logs down the river and over the rapids that would otherwise hold them up. Men would ride these logs down the river. It was a treacherous occupation due to the fact that these logs would turn and the men would have to change positions in split seconds or be swallowed up by the current.

After some time, the land would be cleared of trees and stumps. Stones would be removed to create tillable land for farms. My grandfather, Herman Zahn was one of the first settlers in this area, and he raised a family on some of this land. Unfortunately he died from pneumonia at the age of thirty-nine. My father, Charles Zahn, was the oldest son in the family and was only eleven years of age when he lost his father. Thus, it became his duty to do the farm work, and naturally he didn’t get to go to school. He was only in the fourth grade when this happened. He told us that the neighbors were of great help when he needed muscular assistance or advice. Later, as a young adult, he finally left home and established a more individualized type of life. He married Lily Graper, and they purchased an eighty acre farm and proceeded to develop the land by removing stones to clear more acreage. This plot of land was near a small village in Wisconsin named Smithsville, after one of the first settlers in this area. Later it was named Pella, which means a haven.

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My parents, Charles & Lilly (Graper) Zahn (1924)

A number of families settled in this area. The small village consisted of a cheese factory, a saw mill with planing services, three taverns, a general store which carried basic elements including overalls for men, and also served as a post office. Farmers took their grain to the grist mill to have it ground to feed their animals. There was also a white brick school and an enormous dance hall. My uncle, Bill Graper, had a blacksmith’s shop here where farmers took their horses to have them shod.

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Home Farm

On the eighth day of August in the year 1918, Charles and Lilly (Graper) Zahn welcomed their fourth son named Melvin to the world. Two years later another boy, Roy, joined the Zahn family on the twentieth day of August to complete the family, a family of three girls (Edna, Irene, Emgard) and five boys (Harvey, Carles, Alvin, Melvin, Roy). I regret that I do not remember much about my oldest sister, Edna. I just know she had a big hand in caring for me. I know that she was married, and according to what my mother said, she left home so there were fewer mouths to feed, living with her in-laws on a farm near Marion, Wisconsin. I also remember the night she died from an infection, blood poisoning, caused from childbirth. She was in an up-stairs room of her father-in-law’s house. She had complications from giving birth to her son, but it was taboo to talk about sex in those years, so when these complications began she didn’t mention anything to her mother-in-law. In those days childbirth was usually done in the home without the presence of a doctor, but instead with a midwife. I remember on the night she passed away, my parents took us along to the house where she was, but we weren’t allowed inside. We were later told that she had died from convulsions. I was six years of age at that time, 1924. Her infant son also died shortly after birth. I faintly recall her casket being in our living room, and people came to view the body. There were no funeral homes at that time and funerals were conducted from the homes of the people involved. I do not recall every minor detail of my very early years, but I am confident that I had three older sisters of which the two eldest definitely had responsibilities of caring for me. There were no pampers then. Diapers were made out of flannel and they had to be rinsed and washed quite often for obvious reasons.

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My Mom and Dad’s family, July 31st, 1954 (Back row, left to right) Melvin, Carles, Emgard, Irene, Harvey; (Front Row) Alvin, Roy, Charles (Dad), Lillian (Mom). (Tragically, Mom died about two months later in a car accident)

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The farmhouse I was born and raised in, about ¼ mile east of Pella, Wisconsin (1920’s)

We had no electricity and no radio, so most of the news was from the immediate neighborhood, with news traveling from neighbor to neighbor. The lighting in the homes was from kerosene lamps and lanterns. The lanterns were also used in the barn, and they were hung from the ceiling to provide the most light possible. Our school studies and all reading was done with lamplight. These glass lamp chimneys had to be cleaned every day, and the lamps had to be refueled with kerosene. That was the task of one of the girls or my mother. After we had done our lesson, prepared for school and read all the important elements, we were usually in bed by eight o’clock.

Mail delivery came by horse and buggy every day. The rural carrier started from Clintonville, approximately eleven miles away and made the complete round daily, Monday through Saturday. The buggy was like those the Amish use today. It was a treat to see the rural carrier come to deliver mail to our house. We would watch him put the mail into the mailbox and then have the horse pulling the wagon trot away to the next mailbox. On occasion we had other visitors. These were gypsies who begged anything and everything from food or clothing for themselves to food for their horse. I recall one such visitor who confronted my father for a handful of oats for their poor starving horse, which was about to die. My father’s reply was, If your horse is so starved only one handful of oats is not going to do him much good. We also had to watch so nothing was stolen, something these visitors were prone to do. One of their members would engage someone in conversation while others could be stealing something.

There were very few automobiles, and only an occasional horse and buggy would pass our house. The roads were paved with gravel only and were very dusty. In spring when the frost came out of the ground these roads became very muddy and full of ruts. On many of the country roads there was little or no gravel which made them almost impossible to travel on when the frost left the ground. So, that limited travel quite a bit.

We had few toys to play with as youngsters, and these had to be shared. Many times our play had to be improvised. We lived on a farm near the village of Pella, where I was born. We seldom traveled from the farm except to go to church or school, so our knowledge was mainly from the farm. Since we had to improvise much of our activity, we had a large apple orchard, one corner of which became our play farm. Our play buildings were constructed out of wooden boxes which had been used to store dynamite. My father used the dynamite in the fields to blast out rocks and stumps that were too large for a team of horses to pull out. Our machinery was made out of spools and wheels or whatever we could get to simulate farm machinery. Our cows were colored stones which were picked from the gravel on the roadway. We picked these up during our daily routine of taking the cows to the pasture. We would let the cows graze on the roadside, which made for a leisurely method of tending the cows. The cows were in no danger because there was little or no traffic by automobile, and if there was, the traffic would stop to let the animals pass. This allowed us plenty of time to search for these colored stones. The person who had the most brightly colored stones had the best herd. After we became older, we even conducted auctions to try to get a few of someone else’s colored stones. The auctions took place when one would be given responsibility elsewhere on a more permanent basis and that would take away from their play time, so the sale was held to take the person away from this play area. We simulated haying by cutting the grass with a shears and when it was dry it was hauled on our makeshift wagons and put into the barn lofts. Sometimes to simulate visitations to our friends on the hillside we would use gallon pail covers from syrup pails for steering wheels, and on the hillside behind our house we would drive from large stone to large stone in an imaginary sense to see our friends for a short visit.

As a toddler, my younger brother, Roy, was just learning to walk at one point and managed to get to the pantry. There he got on a chair and on the table which unfortunately had a butcher knife. He took hold of the knife, lost his balance and fell to floor with the knife which pierced his left cheek. In those days, trips to the doctor were rare so my mother wrapped a clean white cloth around his head and the wound healed but left a scar which he had the rest of his life.

For recreation, we had to improvise. One of the games we played was deer and hunter. One day while playing around the house where my dad had erected a fence around the apple orchard, I wasn’t looking and ran into it causing deep gashes over my arms and stomach. Again, my mother used her home-made approach, and I had to withstand the pain until that had healed.

In later years this childhood play was curtailed or replaced with more responsibilities with the farming operation and household chores. These chores consisted of carrying in split wood for the cook stove and bigger chunks of wood for the heater (the main source of heating our house), carrying in water from the well to drink (pumped by hand), and filling the reservoir of the cook stove. We could use the water from the stove’s reservoir for washing our hands and face because that water was warm from the heat of the stove. Water for the cows, horses, and other animals was pumped by a windmill which could be engaged by putting it into gear. However, on days when there was little wind, the tank for watering the animals had to be pumped by hand.

Water for washing the clothes was gotten from a cistern that was lined with concrete. Rain water was collected and stored via the down spouts from the rain gutters on the house. Needless to say, these cisterns were placed directly next to the house and covered. The water was pumped from the cistern with a pump in the pantry of our home. This water was heated in the large boiler on the cook stove and was used for our usual bath and when there were clothes to be washed. After the clothes were washed and rinsed, they had to be hung out to dry, but before that was done my mother would wipe each clothes line.

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The home farm chicken coop (1928)

Feeding the chickens and gathering the eggs were among other chores we had to perform. One other chore was feeding the calves that my father chose to raise to replace cows which were sold after they became unproductive. I certainly can’t forget cleaning the barn. It was a nasty job but needed to be done. The manure in the gutter had to be loaded on a wheelbarrow and wheeled out on the barnyard on a pile. The walkway in the barn was covered with lime so it wasn’t too slippery to walk on for both humans and animals. After the manure was cleaned from the stalls, a fresh bedding of straw or wood shavings, which were gotten from the saw mill, was spread to keep the area relatively dry.

Upon coming home from school each day we changed into our barn clothes and had to get hay from the loft and push it down a chute. This was done for both the horses and the cattle. All this was done so we were ready to feed the hay to the animals after the milking was done. The cows were fed silage before we milked them. That silage had to be gotten from the silo with a large fork and thrown down the chute so it could be put on a cart and distributed to the cattle, each in their individual place. Each cow got a certain amount of grist, which is ground grain and corn. If the animal produced a lot of milk, she would get more grist than another cow that produced less. A cow due to freshen (i.e. which was bearing a calf), was fed a larger helping of grain, so she would be able to produce milk to feed her young. Besides hay, the horses were fed oats, and again, each got a certain amount. Usually, if they worked hard during the day they would be fed more oats. The horses had to be curried and brushed each day; especially before putting the harness on them. It was qite the task to put the harnesses on the horses because we were short and the horses were relatively tall, and not all horses were too gentle about the procedure. Besides feeding and currying the horses they had to be led out for water, which they drank from a large tank outside the barn. This was the water that was pumped by hand or by windmill. Later my father bought a gasoline engine which would turn a pump jack which in turn pumped the water for the stock and also pumped water to cool the milk in the milkhouse.

Each of us had some cows to milk by hand since, there was no milking machine on the market yet, and we certainly didn’t have one. Furthermore, we didn’t have any electricity to power a milking machine if there would have been one. After the milking was done we had to take the cans of milk to the milk house and