New Publication: Broadway School in the 1940s

It’s a fact: a school is more than a building, more than books, more than the teachers and students within—and the farther you get from your school days, the more you appreciate the impact of school on you and your community.

The building on the northeast corner of Dunklin and Broadway was a public school from 1904 to 1955. Today, most people know it as the Carpenters Hall, since the local Carpenters union operated it as an office building longer than it was a school. Now, it has been remodeled into private apartments. Schroeder breathes life into the history we sense as we ponder this historic building.

Reflecting in his eighties, historian Walter A. Schroeder shares his personal experiences of attending Jefferson City’s Broadway Elementary School in the 1940s. It was a much different learning environment than what today’s schoolchildren experience. While public documents and newspaper accounts can present a basic outline of what public elementary schools were like in the past, only accounts like these—of personal experiences—can make history come to life.

A slim volume packed with information, Broadway School in the 1940s offers details like these:

• All boys wore long pants; all girls wore dresses. All shoes were made of leather.
• Class size was 30–35 children, and all the teachers were unmarried women.
• All pupils had their weight and height recorded every six weeks.
• Student desks had a round hole originally meant to hold an ink bottle, but the ink bottles used in the 1940s didn’t fit the holes. So kids dropped paper wads down the holes: “Bombs away!”
• Students learned to write in cursive using the Palmer method.
• Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays were observed separately, on different days.
• The playground had separate sides for boys and girls, with the same playground equipment on both sides.
• The hand-held, brass school bell was wielded by the principal or by the janitor.
• Report cards included notes on deportment, study habits, and attitudes.
• Cloakrooms held coats, caps, gloves, scarves, and galoshes—but no actual cloaks!
• All the students, and nearly all of the teachers, walked to school every day. School was never closed for inclement weather.

In addition to his detailed accounts of what Broadway School was like in the 1940s, Schroeder offers his reflections on the changes he’s observed after seventy years: decorum in the classroom, changing technology, evolving public educational policy, diversity, and more.

“I want people to have a detailed description,” Schroeder says. “Over a thousand kids were educated in that building. Early education leaves an indelible imprint in our lives. Elementary education was so different in the past. And there are few people left who have memories of Broadway School as it was.”

An entertaining, authentic collection of memories of a wartime schoolchild, Broadway School in the 1940s paints vivid scenes of a historic elementary school, inspiring readers of all ages to make comparisons to their own school memories.

Broadway School in the 1940s, by Walter A. Schroeder
Published in 2023 by the Historic City of Jefferson, Inc.
58 pp.; 28 photographs and illustrations

Broadway School’s Last Day!

Broadway School, located on the northeast corner of Dunklin and Broadway streets, opened in 1904.




In the next half century, some 1,600 children in the Old Munichburg neighborhood of Jefferson City’s Southside attended the elementary school. They read Dick and Jane books in the first grade reading circle and had spelling bees in the second grade. In the third grade, they learned to write in longhand (now called cursive) by the Palmer penmanship method, using a scratchy ink pen dipped in an ink bottle. In the fourth grade, they memorized multiplication tables and then added long division and fractions in the fifth grade. By the sixth and final grade, they were sprouting bean seeds in glass jars on the window sills and drawing pictures of the sprouting process in their tablets.




After World War II, Jefferson City schools grew overcrowded. In addition to classrooms being cramped with thirty or more pupils, Broadway’s playground was much too small and bordered on two busy streets. When the school was built in 1904, Dunklin and Broadway streets carried horses and buggies, but by 1950 the same streets carried a couple thousand cars daily. Traffic posed a serious danger for pupils who ran into the streets to avoid being tagged during a game of “it” or to chase softballs.

 

 


In 1952 Jefferson City citizens voted by an astounding 86 percent to approve school bonds, which included the replacement of the Southside’s two historic schools, Broadway and Central, with two new schools. Broadway would be replaced by the new South School, four blocks father south on Broadway. South School was finished in February 1955 and ready to be occupied.

The last day of school at Broadway was Wednesday, February 9, 1955. It was an unusually balmy day for February, and during recess, pupils played in their shirtsleeves.





Boys made one last assault on the cinder pile next to the coal chute and played on the school’s back steps.








Mrs. Bonnie Haigh posed with some of her fifth grade pupils.




And for the final time, the janitor let the boys ring the handbell to signal the end of recess before they filed through the front doors.





During that night an unexpected cold front moved in, dropping temperatures below freezing! It had snowed! Moving day would have to be done in the snow! Boys and girls arrived at school dressed in coats and caps with earflaps and wearing sturdy shoes and galoshes, because they knew they had to hike in snow the four blocks south to their new school.




Grade by grade, starting with the youngest first graders, the pupils filed out of the school carrying their books and tablets, pencils and erasers, pens and ink bottles, as well as scissors, rulers, paste, and other school supplies in brown paper bags. (There were no plastic bags or nylon backpacks then!) Boys put their marbles in one pants pocket and their pocketknives (for whittling and playing mumblety-peg during recess) in the other. Each class of thirty or so pupils was led by its teacher, assisted by a few mothers.



Some classes sang as they marched through the snow. The schoolboy patrol halted Dunklin Street traffic for the procession of about two hundred persons to cross over. While they marched, the wind and snow started again and became, according to the newspaper account, “a near blizzard.”






The last to leave the old school were Miss Frances Elizabeth Smith, the current principal, and Miss Lily Andrae, who had been Broadway’s first principal in 1904 and had continued in that position until 1926. Miss Andrae had the honor of locking the front door and shutting down the school. To celebrate the new beginning, Miss Andrae presented to South School a set of the complete works of Charles Dickens.






Broadway School became a white elephant. What do you do with a fifty-year-old elementary school? That question was answered when the Carpenters Union 945 bought the building and lot a few months later, in August 1955, for $32,000.



The Carpenters converted it into an office building, but they retained some of the original furnishings. The original wooden stairways and banisters are still intact and polished, and the century-old wooden benches used for seating in the lunchroom remain in that same room, which is now a meeting room. The Old Munichburg Association occupies the former fourth grade room.




Thanks to my mother, Mrs. Edna Schroeder, for taking the photos of the last day and moving day of Broadway School. Her youngest son, my brother Tom, was in the fifth grade at the time. My mother, two of her sisters, and her three sons were among the approximately 1,600 who attended Broadway School.

Copyright 2012 by Walter A. Schroeder.