WILSON COUNTY TEXAS SCHOOL ... a personal account of Valera Meyer Coldewey attending school back in the 1930's & the difference in Wilson County Texas life.
Valera Meyer Coldewey went to Kasper School. She had to walk three miles each way to school. And that was when she was only 8 years old!
She started to Kasper School in 1928. When Valera got older, after walking the three miles to school, it was her job at school in the winter, every morning, to start the fire in the wood heater and to draw water for drinking from the underground cistern to fill the water cooler.
Valera was born in Wilson County to Arthur Meyer and Angela Raabe in 1920. They were farmers. She was the oldest of six children, who included Nola, Earlene, Delbert Ray, James, and Newton. She walked to school with lots of kids, among them the kids of Anton Raabe, Otto Raabe, Rehfeld, Hosek, and other families.
She said she always walked to school barefooted in warm weather, even until she was a teenager. Then when she was about 13, some girl told her she was too old to go barefooted, and she began wearing shoes. She said they didn't wear shoes because they didn't have any. She doesn't remember where she got the shoes to wear at that time.
Her first teachers were Miss Lena and Evelyn Donaho. They drove from Floresville each day to teach. Then she had a teacher named Mrs. Kizzie Kale. Mrs. Kale and her husband and little boy moved into the house called the "teacherage," which was built for the teacher beside the school.
There were three creeks crossing the road the children had to walk on the way to school. One time it rained so hard all day, that when it came time for the kids to walk home, the creeks had risen and they couldn't cross. All the kids that lived east of the school across the creeks had to spend the night with the teacher, Mrs. Kale. There were about 10 or 12 kids sleeping on the floor of the little house.
Valera liked school, especially arithmetic, and she was a good reader. She said she has read all her life. She liked reading until her eyesight got too bad to read. But she didn't like recess like everyone else did, and that was because she said she was "too fat" to play games. I can't imagine that now, because she is a very petite little woman.
Tilly and Ellie Mann were her close friends.
Asked whether the teachers were strict back then, she said they were, and she remembers everyone wearing their coats inside the schoolroom, because the teachers always spanked them with a ruler. The coats cushioned the spanking and even when spring would come, and it was too warm inside, she still wore her coat for that reason.
After walking the three miles home after school, they had to spend the remaining daylight in the early fall and spring working in the fields, then had to do chores before supper: feeding the chickens, gathering the eggs, feeding the hogs, milking the cows, then helping with supper, and afterwards doing homework by the light of a kerosene lamp.
One time all the kids were walking home from school, and a Model-A Ford came along, and the man didn't see Floyd Raabe. The car knocked Floyd down, Floyd rolled under the car and came out on the other side, and the car went on. They thought Floyd was dead, but they all ran over to him and he sat up and he was OK!
Valera says she didn't know why she never told anyone. She wonders if Floyd told his folks, or the other kids ever told anyone. She said they never talked about it again.
Then Mr. Leissner Poth came to teach, and his wife, Alfreda, taught at Dewees School. Later, Mrs. Poth taught at Kasper. Mr. Poth was Valera's last teacher, because as many young people did those days, during the Depression, she quit school when she was 15 to go to work.
When she was 15 years old, Valera Meyer quit Kasper School to work. She worked keeping house for people and also waiting tables. When asked what the young people did back then for entertainment, she said the favorite thing to do was go to dances.
House dances were very popular during the 1920s and '30s. She remembers her parents, Arthur and Angela, having many house dances at their house near the Three Oaks Community. They would move the furniture out of one room, and the Stobb brothers, Oscar and Robert, would play the guitar and accordion. There would be a house dance somewhere every weekend. Besides going to Sokol, Three Oaks, and Poth Hermann Sons Hall, you always could find a dance somewhere in Wilson County.
In the 1940s, Valera worked as a waitress at Schneider's Café in Poth. During the war, the Greyhound bus stopped there, and she said the thing she remembers the most is when soldiers would get off the bus to come in to get something to drink and go to the restroom.
The black soldiers had to go to the attached meat market next door for drinks. They weren't allowed in the café. They had a separate restroom, too. She said she always felt so bad for them that it "broke her heart that they could go to war and get killed for America, but they couldn't come in with the other soldiers."
Later on, when segregation in the United States ended, she was one happy woman.
After she got married, and was living in Poth, Valera always worked. She liked people and she liked working. She was a hard worker all her life. She always worked at cafés, either cooking or waiting tables. She worked at Schneider's Café, Reiningers Café, the Dewees Store at Dewees, and the Cotton Club, where she cooked and waited tables, and where she worked the longest. She said she worked seven days a week, sometimes, like at the Cotton Club, for 14 to 16 hours a day. She very seldom had a day off.
Valera was working at the Dewees Store seven days a week, and remembers the time she even had to miss her family reunion, and her husband and boys went without her that Sunday, and she felt so bad knowing they were there without her.
How much do you think she got paid for all that work during those years? Her salary was usually about $100 a month, and after taxes, maybe $80 or $85, that after working 80 or 90 hours a week. Valera Coldewey knows what hard work was like.
Valera and her husband, Albert, bought their house in Poth in 1944. It was built from the lumber taken from the old Tardia School, which was torn down that year. When I talked to Valera and was looking at the walls and floors of the house, I thought about stories those walls could tell from the days gone by, from the time they were the lumber in Tardia School — to the 65 years Valera and Albert and her sons lived in the house in Poth. There is a lot of history in that house!
Schneider's Café, Reininger's Café, and the Cotton Club are no more in the little town of Poth, but Valera Meyer Coldewey still has lots of memories of the years she worked there. She wouldn't have done things any differently, because she liked to work and liked people. She would have maybe liked having a day off every once in a while, to spend with her family.
I will venture to say, she has passed a strong work heritage on to her sons.😀
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COURTESY /Lois Wauson who interviewed 89 years old Mrs. Poth one 2010 day in her little house in Poth Texas. Author of " Growing Up in the South Texas Brush Country" and "Looking for a Silver Lining". These books are available at Wilson County News.
