talkingroots: Riding to school

I never rode a school bus to school. I know as this is written, most children (and even parents) might wonder why. The rule was school buses only ran outside of the city limits. The rest of us got to school the best way we could. No excuses were accepted for lack of ride, rain, etc. My own children (Michael and Emily) also never rode a school bus to school. Where we lived in Lake Jackson, Texas was within two miles of their schools: A. P. Beutel Elementary, Lake Jackson Intermediate School, and Brazoswood High School (actually across the city limits in neighboring Clute, Texas but still within two miles of our house on Carnation Street. The rule there was busing only beyond two miles from the school.
I don’t know what the rules were in the early 1900’s when my mother, Ozie Mae Moody, also known as Koko to all her grandchildren, was in school. However, much to my surprise when I asked one day about her experiences in school, she recalled that once she was carried to school each day in a covered wagon. You never know what you might miss if you don’t ask.
She describes her wagon experience in this excerpt from my family history, Out of Mississippi, The John Robert Wingate Family of Nacogdoches County, Texasfrom an interview I conducted with her October 19, 1991. Mother at the time of this event was living with her parents , Fred D. Moody and Pamilia Mae Wingate Moody in a logging camp in East Texas. She was sent to school even when they lived in the tent camps and outside of towns such as happened at Tucker Lake.
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Ozie Mae Moody (Koko) in front (center) and brother Oca Robert in front (right) in cap in a school group picture perhaps at Caro School, Nacogdoches County, Texas.
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‘Well, now when we lived in that river bottom (Oca was still going to school then), the camp hired somebody to drive a wagon, and we went to school at Ashton. That’s down there about eight or ten miles below where Oca and Dena lived (note: near Joaquin, Shelby County, Texas). There’s not a building there now. It’s just woods.
‘We had a hoodlum wagon. They never took the cover off. If it was a pretty day, the cover stayed on. It was covered all the way down. It had hooks on little things on each side of the wagon, those hooks fit down in there, but they never took those hooks off. We never went open. That was what made them call it a hoodlum wagon. It was just a wagon and mules. It was just that group of kids that lived in that bottom, but that hoodlum wagon was full. It had a bow top on it, seats on each side of the wagon that ran the length of the wagon, and a seat down through the middle. That’s way we rode to school, knees to knees. It had two mules. Oca rode his horse, and there was another boy who rode his horse. They didn’t ride them every day. But if the weather was pretty, they rode their horses. If they rode their horses, and it rained, they’d tie their horses to the back of the wagon, and they would ride inside going home.
‘We were our little bunch at school. We were the Tucker Lake bunch. At lunch time, we all went to the wagon and ate together. Oca played basketball. We may have been there a full year. We had three little girls about my age. Most of the kids were older. I was in about the third or the fourth grade because we moved over there from Sandy Creek.’
Source: talkingroots.wordpress.com