'TELLS SCHOOL HISTORY'

George W. Samson Writes Entertainingly of the
Early Days of the Leon Public Schools.
 
 Decatur County Journal
Leon, Decatur County, Iowa
Thursday, May 02, 1907

EDITOR JOURNAL: -- I was much interested in reading in the columns of the Journal, the responses from old schoolmates and friends following my communication of a year ago. "One of 'Em" might as well have signed her name instead of trying to conceal herself behind a nom-de-plume. The marks of personality in her letter are as clear in outline as an Alpine Mountain peak against the morning sky. It sounded, when read aloud, just like her. She was always bright, cute, witty and popular. She was smart enough to get her lessons ahead of time and had leisure left to practice the gentle art of having fun in various ways by which she managed to keep MR. FRAZIER and the entire school pretty well stirred up most of the time.

One day, however, she was bending earnestly over her desk, her sunbonnet thrown carelessly over her head with the strings hanging down one side. MR. FRAZIER noticed her and presently addressed her in substance as follows: "BELLE, I have read that in old times kings were accustomed to keep at court a character known as the court fool or clown, whose business it was to utter nothing but nonsense and to do ridiculous things continually for the sport of the crowd. But no one respected him or paid him any attention. I think I will assign you that position in this school." BELLE's eyes were flashing and the natural bloom on her cheek had taken on a darker hue which Walter Scott, in the celebrated passage in Marmion, calls "the flush of rage." She looked MR. FRAZIER squarely in the face and assured him in a short speech which, for force, clearness and directness could hardly be excelled. "MR. FRAZIER, I have this bonnet over my head to keep the sun off me from that window and I am not a fool nor a clown either," (with increasing emphasis on each word). We all held our breath wondering what would be the next play in the game because it was evidently MR. FRAZIER's "move." He had been "checked" but not "mated." He rose calmly, looked across the room for an instant and then said quietly; "Oh, I see! MR. HINDS, will you close that shutter." MR. HINDS closed the shutter, the owner of the sunbonnet acknowledged her defeat for the time being by placing said sunbonnet back in the desk, we all breathed freer, and the school routine was resumed. It was a case of the "soft answer that turneth away wrath."

More than twenty-one years afterward I was a guest at BELLE's table and, with her permission, told this tory to her husband and children, greatly to the amusement of the younger members of the family. (Your readers need not try to guess who it was. There were several BELLES in school at the time.)

But "One of 'Em's" memory is a little at fault, I never chopped wood for the Widow Jordan. My brother, ED, did that. I chopped for MR. RYAN. She is right about the butternut suit and calf skin boots, but we did not stand round the organ and sing from "The Triumph." We did that later in the county institutes. There was no organ in the school that winter and I never saw a copy of "The Triumph" till after I left school. But when WILL JORDAN and CLARA PATTERSON sang in the school exhibition at the close of the term, with gentle DELLA SANFORD at the organ imported for the occasion, my soul was then and there born to musical consciousness with a suddenness and completeness comparable only to that in the case of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus. There are sudden conversions in the intellectual and aesthetic nature of man as well as in the moral and spiritual. I was transfigured and my emotional experience passed the bounds of human expression. I am very sure that a snap shot of my face at that moment would show me with my chin drooping, lips parted, brows elevated, and eyes staring with that rapt and far away look as of those who had been caught up to Mount Olympus, had gazed upon the faces of the gods and had heard things unlawful to human utterance. Since that time I have heard the unrivaled Theodore Thomas Orchestra many, many times, as well as Oratorio in St. Louis, Chicago, and Boston; the great organ in St. Peter's Rome; the Passion Play at Oberammergau; the world famous organ at Luzerne, Switzerland; grand opera in Paris, and the most splendid church music in the world in St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey; and all these experiences were wonderful.

They left impressions that can never fade from the tablets of memory, but will abide as a precious heritage while life remains. And yet I am sure that in none of them did I experience such an ecstatic and rapturous thrill as that which struck me with such transcendent and transforming power when DELLA played and WILL and CLARA sang. AARON FRAZIER was a man of power. I know now that he had his faults, in common with humanity, and that they were neither few nor small. But his intellectual ascendancy over me, a green country boy of sixteen, was supreme, and the service he rendered me cannot be recompensed except by the Great Bookkeeper above in whose system of economics there is no error and whose accounts always balance. He was the first real teacher I ever had. My teachers in the country school -- peace to their ashes! They are all gone and they doubtless did the best they knew--but they never entered into my life as an intellectual or moral force. Not any instruction they ever gave or any word they ever uttered moved me in either direction, mental or moral. I despised them heartily for their readiness to inflict pain either by the convenient switch or the more stinging process of sarcasm or ridicule. If these lines fall under the eyes of some of my former pupils in Decatur County where I taught in Franklin, Long Creek, Eden and Woodland Townships, it is more than likely they will remember that at times I manifested much of the same spirit and manner. But they should remember that in our first attempt at creative work we are prone to follow and to imitate the models that have been before us, and my country school teachers were such "models" as I have described above.

When, I met MR. FRAZIER, a new world with new ideals dawned upon me, which however I lost sight of entirely in my first attempts to teach. Can I ever forget that first morning in MR. FRAZIER's school? My father had brought me from home in the farm wagon, and located me at my boarding place at MR. IRA B. RYAN's. The bell rang just as I left MR. RYAN's gate and consequently I was l0 minutes late. As I climbed the stairs I think I must have experienced what mountaineers call "mountain sickness," what actors call "stage fright" and what hunters call "buck fever." I felt for an instant that I must turn and run; that if I touched that door knob in front of me it would be the same as to call from the vasty deep a legion of terrors to crawl in my ears! Before I reached the top of the stairs the feeling had changed to one of buoyant expectancy, for I knew perfectly well that I was leaving behind me the old life, and that beyond that door to MR. FRAZIER's room there was opening to me a new life in a new world. I sank into the nearest seat.

Fifty pair of eyes were leveled at me, but I did not return their stare. I looked toward the teacher and saw that he was the only one who did not stare at me, I was grateful for that. He had evidently been speaking to the pupils on the virtue of self-reliance and I caught the words. "Do not be too ready to call on your companions to assist you." Then that would be easy advice to take under the circumstances, should I ask help from these young gentlemen in fine linen and fashioned clothes? Nay, verily! and as for those young ladies! Would a mortal address goddesses on equal terms? Well, not this one, if he knows himself!

MR. FRAZIER let me alone for the first half hour. I was grateful again. When the first recitation was over he came down the aisle and said, "You are MR. SAMSON I believe." If I had felt less like a rooster in a cyclone with every feather plucked out of him, I would have said: "Sir, you are laboring under a misapprehension. There is only one other man besides my father in Decatur County who thinks he has a right to be called MR. SAMSON, and that's my brother, ED. You are evidently mistaking me for him." But as it was, being dumb with embarrassment, I simply nodded a dignified assent as to the SAMSON, with a mental reservation as to the "Mr." "Perhaps you would like to sit as a visitor today and observe our customs." Gratitude again. Certainly. If nobody would speak to me or look at me for twenty-four hours, I might possibly collect my senses. And from that hour MR. FRAZIER had my absolute trust and veneration. Not a word that he uttered during four months escaped me. I was in a state of mind which psychologists call "semi-hypnosis" or "expectant attention," the condition par excellence for receiving instruction. I labored hard in the evenings to get my lessons so I might have time in the day to hear MR. FRAZIER's talks to his other classes, and when he read aloud some of the old selections in McGuffey's readers, they shone with a new meaning.

But sometimes he scolded, and when he did, his words burned and blistered the victims. And when he stamped his foot, I thought he shook the town of Leon. It was his custom those days to request three or four boys to bring up wood for the stove at the close of the morning recess. One day the request was given courteously as usual to four of the boys, myself among them. Three of us brought wood but the other, (CASS by name,) returned empty handed. When all was quiet, MR. FRAZIER rose and spoke to him slowly but with great firmness: "CASS you may bring some wood or take your books and leave." CASS took out his books promptly and smiling at everybody, left the room with a sweeping bow. He never returned as far as I know. I have often wondered what MR. FRAZIER would have done if CASS had stood on his rights as an American citizen and had said: "MR. FRAZIER, I will neither bring wood nor leave school," because, under the law, a pupil may not be compelled to do janitor work. But I believe he would have been equal to the occasion, because in extricating himself from difficult situations as in the sunbonnet incident above related, he had manifested a genius equal to that of the present strenuous occupant of the White House at Washington.

After four months' attendance, I left MR. FRAZIER's school, but not the same boy that had entered. I had seen a vision as from a mountain top. My horizon had been expanded and lifted, and manhood's ambitions began to beckon from the distance. I had had, without being fully conscious of it, the same experience which Oliver Wendell Holmes imagines for his Chambered Nautilus, "Child of the Wandering Sea," in the lines:

"He left the past year's dwelling for the new.
Stole with soft step the shining archway through.
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in the new-found home, and knew the old no more."

Yes, the entrance door to that school room was to me the shining archway leading to a "new-found home" of the soul. Intellectual tasks, previously irksome, became a pleasure and an inspiration to ever increasing effort.

But, Mr. Editor, too much reminiscence is a sign of advancing years, and I forbear. The present is better than the past. The Iowa State Normal School with its 2,500 students annually is a splendid field for the exercise of any one's talents who follows the profession of teaching; and, often times, in some of the classes in the professional department of this great school, when the ideal teacher is held up to students for their contemplation, there is no occasion for presenting to view, (without in the least extenuating his faults) the power, the virtues, the influence and the unique personality of AARON FRAZIER.

~ GEORGE W. SAMSON.

Copied by Nancee (McMurtrey) Seifert, August 28, 2001
 
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