The Teacher Was Supreme - Lily (Maki) Dicker
New Ipswich Historical Society
FINNS: An Oral History of Finnish-Americans in New Hampshire’s Monadnock Region
Excerpted from FINNS: An Oral History... by Patricia Kangas Ktistes, 1997, all rights reserved.
Lily (Maki) Dicker
I went to Number Six, a one-room school, and we had six grades and one teacher. We didn’t have any electricity and we had an outhouse. We had a kind of hot lunch program, but only three things I can remember: corn chowder, tomato-and-macaroni, and cocoa. We heated the schoolhouse with a woodstove. I couldn’t talk English when I went in first grade. I had learned a little English from my sister.
My sister—when she went to school—stayed back in the first grade, I think because she couldn’t speak English. I heard a lot of Finnish children were sent home because they couldn’t understand the teacher. My teacher could speak Finnish very good. The kids would sometimes answer in Finnish. Her name was Elisabeth Helstein. Her parents came from Finland.
The kids used to take turns being the ‘janitor.’ You had to go there early to build a fire so it would be warm when the other kids arrived. The teacher put a big pot of cocoa on and would stir the cocoa, giving us lessons, reading from the book. I’ve told this to city folks and they look at me as if I’m making up a story. Then we had to get water and bring this great big jug into the hallway. Some kids would bring lunches and leave lunches and coats in the hallway; we didn’t have heat in there.
Some kids had to walk quite a way and in the winter we didn’t have buses. All of the kids lived on farms. We’d bring milk for chowder and I think potatoes. There might have been three or four kids in each class. Finn kids such as the Leel boys used to bring guns because they would go hunting rabbits after school. They’d leave their guns in the hallway where we left our coats and go hunting on the way home. They probably brought rabbits home and ate them. I wouldn’t eat rabbit now!
At Appleton Academy, kids came from Greenville and spoke French. In the girls’ room all you’d hear was French. The French girls would always get together; they went to parochial schools and I guess they had spoken French there. We had a mixture of nationalities and everyone got along good. This one Greenville woman is a friend of mine. She said, “I used to be afraid of the Finn kids.” She went to Milford High; her mother didn’t want her to come to Appleton because she said there were ‘too many Finns’ there. And then she ended up marrying a Finn!
Where was the #6 school house located?
This great, When I moved to New Ipswich at the age of 11, it was scary. There was a group of Finn girls that came up to me and asked if I spoke English. But as the years came and went I learned about by Finnish roots and have made a lot of friends with the Finnish clans