Let's Revive the Old Amusements

By Mrs. A.J. Wilder

The influenza epidemic has been particularly hard on farm folks, coming as it did just at the close of the season's work when country people were beginning to relax from the strain of raising the year's crops. It is at this time we usually meet one another and become acquainted again. There has been so much depending on our work, especially for the last two years, that we have attended to our business even more strictly than usual and we were really lonesome for some good times together. But being advised by the doctors not to gather in crowds, we have stayed at home as much as possible. Let's hope it hasn't become a habit!

Sometimes I wonder if telephones and motor cars are altogether blessings for country people. When my neighbor can call me up for a short visit over the phone, she is not so likely to make the necessary effort to come and spend the afternoon, and I get hungry for the sight of her face as well as the sound of her voice. When she gets into her motor car, it is almost sure to run for 12 or 15 miles before she can stop it and that takes her away down the road past me. I have no hope that my rather prosy conversation can rival the joy of a ride in the car, and we see less and less of each other.

I am not really prejudiced against the motor car and the telephone. It is the way they are used to which I am objecting. Now when my neighbor calls me up to say she is coming over, I think very highly of the telephone as an adjunct to country life, for it gives me time to dust the mantle shelf, jump into a clean dress and shut the bedroom door. Then I can meet her serenely as tho things were always that way. But I don't like to visit over the 'phone.' I'd much rather be sitting in the same room with my neighbor, so I can see how her new dress is made and if she has another gray hair.

There is one social affair, which used to belong to country life, that I would like to see come back again. That is the old-fashioned Friday night literary at the school house. You older people who used to attend them, did you ever enjoy yourselves better anywhere?

At early candle light, parents and pupils from all over the district, gathered at the schoolhouse, bringing lanterns and candles and sometimes a glass lamp to give an added touch of dignity to the teacher's desk. The lighting was good enough for eyes were stronger in the days before brilliant lights were so common. Do you remember how the school children spoke their pieces and dialogs? It gave one a touch of distinction to speak a part in a dialog.

Then came the debate. Sometimes the older pupils of the school, sometimes a few of the pupils and some of the grownups and again just the grownups took part in the debate, and the questions debated were certainly threshed out to a conclusion. I have been thinking lately what a forum for discussing the questions of the day, political and others, the old-fashioned debate would be. I think that farmers do not discuss these things enough. They are more likely to talk them over with their banker or their merchant when they go to town, and their minds on the questions of the day, take their color from town opinion.

We farmers are very slow to realize that we area class by ourselves. The bankers are organized, even internationally,as a class: merchants, both wholesale and retail, are organized and working in a body for the interests of merchants: labor, except that of the farmer, his wife and children, is very much organized and yet many farmers are still contending, single handed, as individuals against these huge organizations. We are so slow to organize and to work together for our mutual interests. The old-fashioned debates at the country school house would be a place and time where farmers could discuss these things among themselves.

An understanding among farmers, of themselves and how their interests are affected by the questions of the hour, is seriously needed. We cannot take our opinions from our fathers nor even keep the opinions we formed for ourselves a few years ago. Times and things move too fast. We must learn to look at things, even politics, from a farmer's standpoint. The price of hogs is more important to us that whether one political party wins an election simply as a political party. I would like to hear such timely questions discussed in an old-time debate and I really think that a training in public speaking and an understanding of public questions would be worth more to pupils of the schools than games of basketball, by exercising their brains so that they might grow into intelligent, wide-awake citizens.

Well, the debate is finished and it is time for the spelling-down match. How earnestly we used to  line up for the struggle and valiantly contest for the honor of remaining longest on the floor and how we used to laugh when some small school child spelled down an outsider, who had forgotten the lessons in the old spelling book.

Mrs. A.J. Wilder. "Let's Revive the Old Amusements." Missouri Ruralist (February 20, 1919): 24.

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