Those who attend Open House at Pike County High School Friday afternoon will be setting foot on hallowed ground, at least that’s the thinking of Sara Dickert Bowden.

Of course, she was only six years old when she entered the Brundidge Consolidated School in 1936.

Walking into that vast brick building with floors that squeaked with each step and each breath was permeated with the distinctive aroma of sweeping compound, Bowden realized she was in a hallowed place – grammar school.

“When I started school our country was in a depression and people were doing whatever they could to make ends meet,” Bowden said. “Brundidge Consolidated School – nobody ever told us what consolidated meant. The school didn’t have a lunchroom so the children from Tennille and Tarentum usually brought their lunches in a sack or a syrup bucket. The children that lived in town could go home for dinner.

“In one of the classrooms at the end of the hall, a lady had homemade soup for sale for a nickel a cup if you had a nickel.”

The “grammar school” was for grades one through six.

“There was no such thing as a kindergarten back then or a play school, just grammar school,” Bowden said. “And all of our teachers were spinsters or old maids except one and she started out as an old maid but got married while she was teaching us.”

The principal was Robert Tillman and he also taught sixth grade.

“We learned to read in first grade out of Dick and Jane books,” Bowden said. “Those books had four characters – Dick and Jane and a dog and a cat. The teacher had a big chart with pictures and words on it. She would flip the pages of the chart and we memorized the words according to the pictures on the chart. We also memorized the words on the pages of the book –‘See Dick run.’ ‘See Spot run.’ They were always running or jumping. We memorized the words by sight, not sound.”

Bowden said she learned reading by sight and printing by writing on a lined tablet.

“We sat at desks that had seats that went up and down,” she said. “The desk top had a hole where you were supposed to put a bottle of ink but we didn’t have any ink so we just pushed things down in the hole when we got bored.”

The school day also included in coloring with “color crayons,” singing songs and going out to play.

“We had swings, a see-saw and a sliding board,” Bowden said.

The games the children played at play period included drop the handkerchief, Simon Says, Mother May I, Farmer in the Dell and Squirrel in the Tree.

“We jumped rope and played hop scotch, but we called in hop scot but whatever we played we had a lot of fun,” Bowden said. “But what was not fun was going in the cloak room. That was where you hung your coats and where you went to get a paddling. That was not a fun part of school.”

Bowden has fond memories of Brundidge Consolidated School and her teachers and the friends that shared her years at grammar school.

That building is gone now and has been replaced by school buildings that house things that neither Bowden nor any of her schoolmates would have imagined.

Computers, televisions, cell phones, laptops, iPads and iPods were not even words back then. But Dick and Jane provided the basis for learning for the children at the grammar school. “And, our grammar school education served us well,” Bowden said.

Open House at Pike County High School will be from 3 until 5 p.m. Friday and will feature tours of the new buildings on campus, including the art building and field house.

Everyone is invited to attend.