The View from Mrs. Priest’s 4th Grade Classroom, 1953-54 and How Public Health Came to Rangeley

A few years ago, in a vaguely familiar converted school building in Northern New England, I studied the globe lights suspended overhead, scrutinized the tall, tall windows, noticed the radiators and hardwood floors and, for a moment, I was transported to the old Rangeley Elementary School.   To no one in particular, I said “Oh my: this is Mrs. Priest’s room.”

The old Rangeley Elementary School was a unique architectural design based around principles of public health.  About the time the old Elementary School was built in the mid-twenties, the nation had barely recovered from the great Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918,  and was experiencing a continuing  epidemic of infectious diseases, particularly Tuberculosis.  In the 1920s, TB was the nation’s third biggest killer, after heart disease and pneumonia, accounting for about 10 percent of all deaths. Until the introduction in 1952 of the first significant treatment for the infectious respiratory disease Tuberculosis, the “White Plague” was killing over 100,000 Americans each Year.

Without any safe and effective treatments the only proven, effective measures were prevention. It helps to remember that at this time 100 years ago, the Germ Theory was relatively new.  A vigorous public health campaign in the twenties helped turn things around.  While the nation was focused on lowering risks of infectious disease in public spaces, there were other widespread improvements in public health nationally. Attention focused on public health in every aspect of life, notably architecture, sanitation, and nutrition.

For architects designing public schools, this meant lots of flowing fresh air, hence the wide stairwells, tall ceilings, and tall, tall windows.  The topmost sash was so high all the teachers used long poles with little brass hooks designed to fit into little brass receptacles to give purchase.  Lowering the top window a few inches, allowed  a steady flow of warm, germy air to rise rising to the ceiling to be drawn out on the draft from the upper opening, while fresh air blew in through the lower opening at the level of a child’s head.  In winter, the incoming cold air flowed in and warmed over the radiators just below the windows sills.  Mrs Priest and other teachers constantly reminded us to sit up straight because if we slouched, the TB germs could be trapped in our lungs.

In daily life, increasingly widespread use of soap and better household hygiene produced a major advance in personal and home health. Procter and Gamble introduced “It Floats” to promote Ivory soap in 1891, and Lever Brothers Lifebuoy was introduced early in the 20th century.

Another breakthrough was persuading men to stop spitting. Chewing and spitting tobacco was so common that many places of business spread sawdust on the floor to collect not only dirt, but tobacco juice.  For a time, widespread use of spittoons was regarded as a big advance in public hygiene.  But chewing tobacco was soon replaced by chewing gum and  mass produced cigarettes.  Does anyone else remember Carl and Vance Oakes spreading sawdust on the floor at the Main Street Market?

President Harry S. Truman had signed the National School Lunch Act in 1946 to assure a nutritious meal for all American school children, and the hot lunch program came to Rangeley soon after.  In place of our little lunchboxes with PB&J or baloney sandwiches and tiny thermos bottles — plugged with corks! — we came to school with a plate and silverware.  First came a mid morning snack: Few of us who sat in those classrooms will forget the familiar clink of glass milk bottles rattling against the steel crate as they were carried upstairs at around ten o’clock, and then enjoying that fresh milk from local farms through a straw.
Hot lunches were served on long tables and benches in the school basement and I recall vividly that as an eight or nine year old my imagination went wild with anticipation when word passed down the line that lunch was going to be a special foreign recipe.  Expectations crashed when the cook poured a ladle of melted cheese over the four bare saltines on my plate, and announced that this was a special recipe called “Welsh Rabbit”.

After lunch, came vigorous exercise on the swings and on the playing field and in winter, snowball fights. After snowstorms, third and fourth graders spent recess outdoors, lobbing snowballs left and right, making huge forts, stockpiling the snowballs, shouting and hooting.  At the end of the day, looking out the school bus window the snow forts in the schoolyard looked all purple in the early afterschool dusk —  these were the days before colorfast dyes, and our wet hand-knit mittens bled all the reds and blues and browns into the snow, all the color mixing into a dull purple on the snow fort walls, even the occasional purple stray snowball lying here and there in the snowy schoolyard.

Mrs. Priest (mother of Gary and David) was the fourth grade teacher in the 1953-1954 school year at Rangeley Elementary School with classmates I had known since kindergarten. Her room was on the second floor of the west side of the building, directly above Miss Week’s 2d grade classroom.

About the author: Peter Reich attended Kindergarten through fourth grade at Rangeley Elementary School.  A Vietnam-Era Army veteran, Peter completed his education at Bates College and Boston University School of Public Health and worked for 30 years as a faculty and staff member at Boston University Schools of Medicine and Public Health.  Peter’s parents first came to Rangeley during the war-torn summer of 1940, and purchased Orgonon in 1942.  Peter has been a yearly Rangeley regular for all of his 77 years and, since 1971, with wife, children and grandchildren.

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