You kept your brown-bag lunch inside your desk, and when the noon bell rang, everyone pulled their sack out and plopped it on their desk.   By noon, your bologna was greasy and the lettuce wilted.  So we started with the cookies and ate our sandwiches last.  Some of the kids didn't have lunch.  We knew who they were.  They knew who we were.  Nobody said anything about it.  We shared--we broke our cookie in half.   But for the grace of God it could have been us.  "Lunch" was a new word for all of us.  We all had dinner and supper at home.

Nobody was overweight.  We didn't have snacks.  Potato chips.  Fritos.  Junk food.  All that kind of stuff came later.  We ate three meals a day.  If you didn't like what was on the table, dinner was over.  We ate what our parents fixed.  We didn't eat high on the hog.  Brown beans, cornbread--and glad to get it.  Everyone was broke during the war.  Leftover cornbread and milk was breakfast.

There were 63 kids in my first grade class.  Three first grade classes--all of them that size.   You had two opportunities to get a drink or use the bathroom during the day.  The bathrooms were so nasty you held it if you could.   Two bathrooms.  Eighteen rooms, grades 1-6.  You had to do your business on schedule.  Or not.  I ran home every day about to burst rather than use those bathrooms.

Our desks were all the same size.  First grade desks were small.  If it didn't fit you, too bad.  The top of the dest was hinged, so it lifted up.  You put everything under the desk-top and every time you needed something, you had to clear the desk-top to get into it.  Eventually they came out with a design that had a slide-in nook and no hinged top.

I started school with an inkwell in the desk.  You dipped your pen in the ink to write a few words and then repeated the process.  Your fingers were permanently ink-stained.  Ball-point pens were an invention of the future.  If you sat in front of a boy, he would eventually succeed in dipping your braids in the ink.  Having black-tipped hair was common.  And you were at the mercy of the desk behind you.  Their desk was bolted to your seat.  If they moved up or back, so did you.  Eventually they bolted the desks to the floor so they wouldn't scoot around.   And that's when the noise level went down.  It was amazing that the teachers came back the next year.