It seems hard to believe that another summer has come and gone.

All over the area, kids and their parents are looking forward to getting back to school. The kids became bored after about the second month of vacation, while parents, no doubt, have become overly tired of being told, ”There’s nothing to do around here, and there’s nothing – absolutely nothing – to eat in this house!”

The summer I was 6 years old, I began first grade at Church School in Wheatland Township. In those days, we had no kindergarten, and neither did we have anything like “Sesame Street,” so all the basic learning was done during our first grade year.

Of course, “Ding Dong School” was on TV. The Chicago-originated educational program, hosted by Frances “Miss Frances” Horwich, was kind of a forerunner of today’s educational programing. Unfortunately, we didn’t get a TV set until I was in second grade so her best efforts didn’t help me.

At any rate, the beginning of school out in the country meant a trip to Carr’s Department Store in Oswego to buy some new blue jeans, though we’d go to Aurora to buy shoes. School supplies like crayons and fat pencils and wide ruled tablets (mine had cowboy hero Red Ryder and his sidekick, Little Beaver, on the cover) could be bought at Shuler’s Drug Store here in downtown Oswego.

To complete the country school child’s back-to-school kit, a lunch box complete with a vacuum bottle was a necessity. I remember I wanted a Roy Rogers lunch box, but had to settle for Hopalong Cassidy, though that wasn’t too hard to take. Hoppy, wearing all-black, with a two-gun holster rig and his white horse, Topper, in my sisters’ comic books was another of my heroes.

The thing I most remember about those old lunch boxes, though, was that the glass lining of their vacuum bottles broke with very little abuse. One false move and you knew you had to shake the bottle next to your ear to listen for glass shards rattling around inside, making your lunchtime milk into a hazardous substance. I remember breaking at least two of the things – and the actual total was probably much higher.

When we moved into town, I was extremely impressed to find a huge refrigerated milk machine in the hallway of the old Red Brick School that dispensed small cartons of plain or chocolate milk for 3 cents each. No more broken vacuum bottles and accidentally swallowing a mouthful of broken glass!

The inside of Church School seemed huge and fascinating to me, as such places will to 6-year-olds. The classroom had windows along one side only, so the light would come in over our left shoulders, in accord with school regulations – which assumed we were all right-handed, of course. There were two combination restrooms/cloakrooms in the school, one for boys and one for girls – I didn’t find out what a cloak was until I watched a Zorro movie some years later.

The restroom/cloakroom areas were separated by a double entryway at the school’s front door, which no one, to my knowledge ever used.

Facing the wall of the school that had the front doors and the cloakroom doors (it was the long wall opposite the windows), the door farthest to the right opened into the hall and stairway leading to the basement, with the back door that everyone used on the landing.

A second door to the far left accessed the tiny library room. The library had very few dusty, elderly books, all kept in antique barrister bookcases with glass doors that tilted up from the front. The books seemed to be about as old as the cases that held them, and weren’t very inviting for us mid-20th century youngsters.

The basement of the school was home to the huge green stoker furnace that gobbled up coal automatically in the winter, plus a small gym in which we played basketball, of sorts, and other games on the days when the weather didn’t permit outside recess.

The front of the schoolroom was home to most of the school’s blackboards and our teacher’s desk. The back wall of the room featured a real brick fireplace and some more blackboards in alcoves on each side of the fireplace.

The alcoves were used for individualized class instruction. Since there were six grades in that one room my first grade year – the school’s seventh and eighth graders were already being bused to classes in Oswego—individualized class instruction areas were handy.

The only real trauma that first week of school came when we first graders were called for our first reading class by our teacher, Mrs. Dorothy Comerford. As all five of us sat in a semi-circle in front of Mrs. Comerford for our first reading session, she asked us who we thought our reading books were about. I carefully examined the front cover of the book and noticed there were two girls, a boy, and a dog, and I transmitted this bit of information to Mrs. Comerford.

No, she replied, she wanted the names of the folks involved. Diane Paydon raised her hand and answered, “Dick, Jane, Sally, and Spot,” which was the right answer of course. We were all amazed – not to mention shocked – to find she could already read. To this day when I see Diane, I always mutter under my breath, ”Dick, Jane, Sally, and Spot, hey. It’s no fair, that’s what it is.” And it wasn’t, but there we were – she’d gotten her leg up by studying her older brother’s books at home.

Fast forward 73 years and school’s already started for another year, although the days of Red Ryder and Hoplalong Cassidy lunch boxes with glass-lined Thermos bottles are long gone. And, I suspect, neither Dick, Jane, Sally, nor Spot will be making appearances in area classrooms, either, lost to history along with Miss Frances and forcing all kids to write right-handed.

But the excitement still seems to be the same as students stream into local classrooms wearing new school clothes, clutching fat pencils and tablets, and looking for old friends and hoping to make new ones.

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