The Coat Exchange, by Frank C. Goodell

In 2001 Frank Goodell composed a story about his mother and grandmother, the challenge of their life in Harding County, South Dakota, and their love, strength, and resourcefulness. Frank is the son of Harry George Goodell and Cecil Nadine Springer Goodell, and the grandson of John Albert Springer and Lena Blanche Stowell Springer. Frank's mother, Cecil, grew up within the reach of the Govert community and his father came to the Slim Buttes as the teacher for Barr School. Before we settle in for a really good story, here is your author, Frank Goodell, and his wife, Patricia. Now, are you ready for a trip into Govert past?

The Coat Exchange

This is a little story about a coat that my grandmother had long, long ago. It is also a story about what a coat can mean to its owner, or in this case its two owners, in rendering service for many a year. It is a story about a very precious coat and a very poor one. It is a story about the special bonding of my grandmother and my mother that arose through the sharing of the best family coat between them.

My grandmother was born in the late 1880’s and my mother in the early 1900’s. The story takes place about eighty years ago when my grandparents were homesteading a farm in western South Dakota. The family lived in a sod house that grandfather built. It was and still is a remote rural area where neighbors live many miles apart. In those days, as my mother tells me the story, she and her brothers and sisters attended a country school where the teacher (actually my father) taught all eight grades in a one-room schoolhouse. He and the school children rode horses and ponies to school from their remote farms and ranches.

People who lived in that isolated countryside were so starved for news and social interaction, my mother tells me, that in favorable weather someone would ride around to the various homesteads to spread the news of a general gathering on a given Sunday at a grove of trees where they could visit and enjoy each other’s company and share whatever news anyone had to offer. The children were so excited over these upcoming “outings” that they could hardly wait for them to take place. A few photographs survive in the family album showing picnic scenes at the old grove. Looking at the faces caught in the camera you can almost sense the wonderful enjoyment that was taking place as news and companionship flowed all around the small gathered community.

My grandmother had been a teacher in her young adult days. Even though she found herself with my grandfather and their five children on this remote homestead out in the rugged “Slim Buttes” country where she often shot a jackrabbit with her rifle to furnish the evening meal, she was concerned that her daughters receive a proper high school education. This was considered a rather rare achievement in those days out in that rather desolate country.

So it was that grandmother determined that my mother should go to high school at St. Martin’s Academy in Sturgis, South Dakota. This entailed a considerable privation on the farm without her assistance to help rear the younger siblings, coupled with the expense of boarding at the school, but it also meant for grandmother that she give up her coat, the best one in the family, in order that my mother could have a decent one to wear at school. So on the day of departure for Sturgis, grandmother removed her precious coat as they parted and put it on my mother. And she, in turn, gave her old ragged and torn farm coat to grandmother in exchange, and wept tears of thanks and sorrow for this act of special kindness and concern for her proper school appearance.

But one day during that long and lonesome school year mother received a telegram from grandmother telling her that her father, mother’s grandfather, had died in Chambers, Nebraska, where the family had lived before migrating to South Dakota, mostly by team and wagon. The telegram said that she was on the way to attend his funeral, traveling first by team and buggy to Newell, South Dakota, the nearest railroad point, and mother was instructed to meet her at the train station in Sturgis with her coat.

Mother tells me that as the train stopped at the depot, grandmother stepped off in the old farm coat that was patched and repatched many times over. They embraced in their mutual grief over the death of grandmother’s father. Although mother hardly knew her deceased grandfather since the family left that area of Nebraska many years ago when she was still in her infancy, she knew full well the devotion and great respect that her mother had for her pioneering father, one of the first to settle the Nebraska community in which he died.

As they parted when she prepared to board the train that had arrived to carry her into Nebraska on the next leg of the journey, mother took off and passed the precious coat to her mother for the funeral and received in exchange the old farm coat to wear for a short interim period. No matter the years of rural poverty and the deprivations that were a way of life living in a sod house in the remote “Slim Buttes” country, grandmother had always managed to hold on to her dignity and to teach her daughters proper manners and respect for others and to observe the conventions of society, a society they hardly knew or had ever experienced. It was a solemn duty to appear in public in your very best attire, she always told her daughters, no matter how sparse your wardrobe might be. It was a lesson mother learned well, and this very occasion reinforced that learning in an unforgettable way.

About a week later, as the train arrived on the return trip from the funeral, grandmother again stepped down to the platform. Mother was again waiting expectantly. They hugged and chatted until the waiting train heading north to Newell blew the whistle for the “All Aboard!” Drying their tears while managing a final embrace, grandmother removed the precious coat she was wearing and gave it back to my mother, and received in turn the old ragged and patched farm coat for the final leg of her journey back home to the homestead, the sod house, and the waiting family of father and younger children.

It was a wintry scene as mother recalled it, a scene deeply etched in her memory, and one that brought back tears in the remembrance of it all even as she recounted this story to me some years ago. Even yet, she said, she could see grandmother waving goodbye from the train on that snowy day, clad in the old farm coat while mother waved back, warmed in the precious coat that both had shared so closely in the special bonding of a mother and daughter.

At this writing Mother is now well advanced in her 90’s and lives in a nursing home. Having suffered a number of strokes in recent years, her memory no longer sustains her except on the rarest of occasions when something might be said that surprisingly triggers a flash of remembrance. And so it was one day when I asked her if she remembered the story she had once told me about leaving the old sod house on the farm to start high school in Sturgis. I was prepared for her usual response, “I don’t remember anything about that.” But this time, after a lengthy pause, I noticed an unusual light come into her eyes and a great uplifting of her spirit as she suddenly and triumphantly said, “I remember the coat that Mama gave me!”
 
Blessed are the memories that are stored forever in one’s heart.

Frank wrote his story about the coat exchange between his mother and grandmother for a national essay contest and, no surprise, he won. This is a Govert story and, maybe, by printing it here, Goverites, former Goverites, descendants of Goverites and Goverite wannabes can read it and share the spell Frank wove about prairie life. This is a story that should never be lost to our prairie history.

The story was dear to Frank's mother as well. As Frank wrote in his story, this episode of her life continued to be retrievable, even though strokes progressively claimed other memories. Prior to her death at age 93, during a visit by Frank, Cecil brightened and said "I remember the coat that Mama gave me". This happened close in time to the visit recorded by the picture below.

Cecil is the lovely, white-haired woman seated next to Frank, who is holding her hand. Cecil may be 93, but she appears timeless. The other women in the photo are, as Frank fondly calls them, his "sibling sisters": Sr. Elaine Goodell, standing; Donna Boone, seated at far right; and Patty Braithwaite behind Cecil.

You'd like to see a picture of Frank's grandmother, wouldn't you ... the grandmother who played such a prominent part of his story. Frank does not disappoint. Frank's grandmother Lena, also called "Dabu" by her family, is pictured here in front of the sod house in the Slim Buttes area.

More Springer history and Goodell history remains to be told so, some Thursday to come, we will return here and continue where we left off.

Listening to the wind blowing through the prairie grass. Kate

[Offered to you with much gratitude to Frank Goodell for sharing his story, his pictures ... for sharing his family ... in fulfilling our common goal to preserve the history of a part of the prairie dear to both of our families, and dear to everyone who ever called this corner of the prairie "home".]

Fox and Geese ... and Children ... Oh My!

No winter passes in the North Country of South Dakota without the bite of bitter cold. This very day of February the temperature in Buffalo, South Dakota, may rise as high as 5 degrees. Yesterday the high was -3 and last night the temperature fell into the double digits below zero. Harding County winters were no different back when Govert School was in session to teach the children of Govert township.

The memory of Govert as a town includes the memory of wood frame houses with little or no insulation, miserably warmed by a wood or coal burning stove. Goverites had no experience with layers of insulation in their attics measured in inches, with high efficiency gas or electric furnaces, with double paned windows. How cold was it? Cold enough for the pail of water in the kitchen to freeze during the night. Yes, that cold.

But what does this have to do with fox and geese and children? For this story we need a winter scene, so play along.

During the years the Govert community stood on the prairie ... during the 1910's, the 1920's, the 1930's, and into the 1940's ... the only warm place in the house on a cold day was the stove. The stove came in many shapes, and your house might have only one ... the cook stove ... but picture in your mind a pot-bellied stove. From watching their parents, children learned to face the stove to warm their hands and their front side, and then to turn around to warm their back side. Many of the stoves had a foot rail so you could pull up your chair and prop your feet on the stove rail. In winter, life in the North Country played out within the effective radius of the stove. Yes, that cold.

And now on to the fox and geese and children.

A favorite winter game for Govert school children was Fox and Geese, a game of tag. Other agreeable versions of tag could be played before the first snow and after the last snow, but Fox and Geese required a good snowfall. Sitting at their desks in the one room Govert school house, with that first snow calling them by name, the children grew restless for recess, eager to stomp out a new playing field. They fidgeted and bit their lips, made faces, looked around and rocked in their chairs, making scratching and thumping noises.

By the time the children thought they could restrain themselves no longer, the teacher knew their minds were beyond her reach and she called recess. If it was the year Miss Blomberg was the teacher, the children who jumped from their desks were James Donohue, Mercedes Hafner, Marie Kulisich, Billy Lale, Albert Springer, Edwin Springer, Roland Springer, Alice Mae West, Evaline West, and Nona Marie Wald.

For whatever reason of childhood, not even the most unbearable of cold winter days could get in the way of children intent on recess. The children piled into the cloakroom and bundled up, layering on sweaters, coats, mufflers, mittens, snowsuits ... whatever they had taken off and hung on the hooks when arriving at school that morning. They early learned to pull on their snow boots before adding on the last layers of clothing, or they would never be able to bend over and reach their feet.

Scrambling outside to their favorite play area, the children then stomped and shuffled through the snow, one behind the other, like a parade following in the same path. First, the children stomped a path making a circle, a large circle several feet in diameter. Then they stomped straight paths across the circle like a wagon wheel, one rim to the other. The hub of the wheel was stomped flat, too. Shuffle and stomp. Shuffle and stomp.

If you've never seen the wheel of a horse drawn wagon, you might not be able to imagine how the spokes radiate from the hub in the middle to the rim on the outside edge. In that case, think of how a pie is cut, from one edge of the circular pan to the other. These Govert children knew their wheels and they knew their pies, and they knew how to easily entertain themselves.

Entertain themselves they did. Miss Blomberg was sure to add certainty to any indecision over who would be the fox. The fox, of course, was "it" in both nature and on the playground. Maybe James Donohue was the fox. He was one of the older boys that year. Or maybe Marie Kulisich, or one of the West girls was the fox this time. Everyone took a turn at being "it". No one seemed to mind.

The fox took a place in the hub of the wheel while the remaining players, who were the geese, spread out along the circular path, as far away from the fox as they could get. And then the wily fox leapt from the center of the circle and chased the geese. The geese scattered around the circular path and up and down the straight paths. Once the chase was on, the children could not leave the perimeter of the outer circle.

The playground purist might insist that the fox could only follow the straight lines, while the geese could seek escape along any path. But, as with any playground game, you might make your own rules. Who really cares who follows which path when all you want is a good chase and 15 minutes of shrieking excitement. The purist would tell us the goal of the game was for the fox to tag a goose, who then became the hunter instead of the hunted. Miss Blomberg might confide the goal was to consume the excess energy of children who would otherwise wiggle in their chairs during lessons.

These children of Govert, played hard during recess. They ran hard, jumped hard, laughed hard, and the excitement and activity warmed them better than any stove. Recess ended with rosy cheeks, glowing eyes, and numb fingers. Most children are reluctant to give up their freedom for the classroom once again, but our future mothers and fathers, and future ranchers, future teachers, social workers, and artists returned to the cloakroom of their one room schoolhouse, and once again hung their coats and snowsuits on hooks.

Now wait for it ... wait for it ...

Not much time passed before the first child walked into the narrow circle of heat surrounding the pot bellied stove in the schoolhouse. No one seems to mind. Miss Blomberg was cold, too, and didn't discourage the children from leaving their seats and warming themselves at the stove. Another child takes a turn at the stove, and then another. The children warm their hands facing the stove, and then turn around to warm their back side.

What is it about recess that makes children invincible as against the cold?

Listening to the wind blowing through the prairie grass. Kate

[Written with gratitude to the fox and geese of long ago Govert, South Dakota, Marie Kulisich and Alice Mae and Evaline West.]

Merry Christmas from the Govert, South Dakota, P.T.A.!

"Merry Christmas!" "Hiya, neighbor! Merry Christmas!" "Good evening and Merry Christmas!" "Hey! Merry Christmas!" "Merry Christmas to you, too!"

Voices from every direction called out cheery greetings as Goverites gathered at the schoolhouse for the Govert, South Dakota, P.T.A. Christmas Program. Every man, every woman, and every child, glowing shiny clean and rosy from excitement, was carefully dressed for the holiday celebration. They were ready for the best, the biggest, the most enthusiastic community gathering of the entire year.

Inside the schoolhouse, the children's desks had been pushed to the fringe of the room and rows of wooden benches were lined up facing the blackboard in front. In the swelling anticipation, an evergreen tree decorated with tinsel and colored balls, standing awkwardly to the side of the blackboard, seemed bigger, brighter, and more confident than perhaps it really was. Nine-year-old Marie Kulisich thought this tree, brought in from the Slim Buttes, was the most beautiful Christmas tree she had ever seen.

Darkness closed in on the schoolhouse and, although the weather grew only colder and colder as the evening progressed into night, the coal stove burned hot. Gasoline lanterns, carried in by the Govert neighbors, radiated light and a little heat, brightening the schoolroom. With all the neighbors crowded into the single room of the 19' by 27' schoolhouse, the air became warm, almost steamy.

The desk of the Govert country school teacher, Alma Eleanor (Cox) Schuck, the widow of Walter Benjamin Schuck these last 14 years and more, was pushed to the side of where the stage now sat in front of the benches, on the side opposite from the decorated evergreen tree. Every inch of Mrs. Schuck's desk was obscured by plates holding cakes and cookies, and more plates holding sandwiches piled so high as to threaten to tumble. And coffee. The P.T.A. always served coffee, strong and hot.

With no admission fee, the P.T.A. Christmas Program was the perfect holiday activity for rural Harding County families during the Great Depression. What should Goverites find in the Govert schoolhouse that night in December but a glamorous Christmas tree, hours of laughter and heartfelt entertainment, companionable fellowship with neighbors, and sugary treats for everyone. Who could ask for more happiness than the oh-so-pleasant here-and-now, in that interlude before leaving this bright place to find their way home in the dark and cold of the earliest morning hours?

Like all the years preceding, the P.T.A. Christmas Program for 1939 was an acclaimed hit among Goverites and all the farming and ranching families within reach of the Govert schoolhouse. The performers that year were Mercedes Hafner (2d grade), Marie Kulisich (4th grade), Leroy Scofield (2d grade), Roland Springer (1st grade) and Edwin Springer (2d grade), and Alice Mae West (4th grade) and Evaline West (6th grade). Twelve-year-old Billy Lale was the oldest student at Govert School that year; he was in the 7th grade. Billy joined in the songs and acted in the plays with the other students.

Eager for holiday excitement, the grade school students, their parents, brothers and sisters, and all of their neighbors, including the old bachelors in the township, began the program singing ... quite loudly ... "Joy to the World". The children ended their program much, much later, tired and happy, singing "The Tree That Blooms at Christmas." Between these two songs were plays, readings, recitations, a dialog, and more holiday musical favorites.

P.T.A. PROGRAM

Joy to the World ...... Song by All

Silent Night ...... Song by Govert School

Just a Hint ...... Reading by Alice Mae West

Our Baby ...... Recitation by Edwin Springer

One Drawback ...... Recitation by Roland Springer

It Came Upon the Midnight Clear ...... Song by Govert School

Tangled Telephone ...... Play by Govert School

Poor Dolly ...... Recitation by Mercedes Hafner

Christmas at Grandma’s ...... Recitation by Leroy Scofield

Put a Candle in the Window ...... Song by Govert School

Christmas Angels ...... Reading by Evaline West

Nurse! Nurse! ...... Dialog by Alice Mae West and Marie Kulisich

A Wise Christmas Gift ...... Recitation by Edwin Springer

Dear Little Stranger ...... Song by Govert School

Christmas Strategy ...... Play by Govert School

Hark the Herald Angels Sing ...... Song by All

The Tree That Blooms at Christmas ...... Song by Govert School

By the time the Govert schoolchildren sang the Christmas lullaby, Dear Little Stranger, little brothers and sisters were snuggling in their parents' laps, with mommy's or daddy's protective arms around them. The adults were smiling nostalgically, remembering their happiest Christmas times. Waves of light and sound echoed between the stage and the densely seated benches. These are the voices of children you would have heard: Dear Little Stranger.

And these are the words:

Low in a manger, dear little Stranger,

Jesus, the wonderful Savior, was born.

There was none to receive Him, none to believe Him,

None but the angels were watching that morn.

Refrain:

Dear little Stranger, slept in a manger,

No downy pillow under His head;

But with the poor He slumbered secure,

The dear little Babe in His bed.

Angels descending, over Him bending,

Chanted a tender and silent refrain;

Then a wonderful story told of His glory,

Unto the shepherds on Bethlehem’s plain.

Dear little Stranger, born in a manger,

Maker and Monarch, and Savior of all;

I will love Thee forever! Grieve Thee? No, never!

Thou didst for me make Thy bed in a stall.

By the time the children reached their finale, "The Tree That Blooms at Christmas", Mercedes, Marie, Leroy, Roland, Edwin, Alice Mae, Evaline, and Billy wistfully sang their wishes for a Christmas tree with presents stacked underneath.

We, with hearts so light and happy

Gather 'round the Christmas tree;

There are gifts that love has given,

Gifts for you, and gifts for me.

Chorus:

See the tapers, lighted, burning,

Sending forth a cheery glow;

See the tree, a-sparkle, turning,

All its dainty gifts to show.

Tops and balls, and drums and every

Gift to mention, swinging there.

What care we, though snowflakes whitely,

Flutter through the frosty air.

For the tree that blooms at Christmas,

With its fruit so strange to see,

Bears amid the shining branches.

Some sweet, dainty gift for me.

As they sang, the children were glad for this holiday celebration at the schoolhouse ... and wondered whether their own tree would bloom this Christmas.

Listening to the wind blowing through the prairie grass. Kate

[Based on an article in the Govert Advance, December 28, 1939; with gratitude to Marie Kulisich for assisting with details; Dear Little Stranger, Charles H. Gabriel, 1900; The Tree That Blooms at Christmas, Author Unknown, sung to "Let the Lower Lights Be Burning", Philip P. Bliss, 1871]