Dear Elders, When I was going to school, I walked to elementary school, but took the bus to middle and high schools.
My parents used to go on and on about how lucky I was that I could take the bus to school, because they had to walk their whole school career. I’m curious to find out if you really did walk to school, uphill both ways, in snow waist-high, like my parents told me they did. Couldn’t you have just taken the bus or hitched a ride with someone?
Signed,
Never Lost My Bus Pass
Jan Stickler
Dear Never,
I never did, either. I walked to elementary school: old P.S. 123. It was about a 10-minute walk. It snowed in the winter, but school was never cancelled. Elementary schools were neighborhood schools, and everyone walked.
I don’t recall it being a particular hardship, but we never would have complained because our parents had endless tails of the hardships they endured. We moved to suburbia at the end of my sixth grade, and I entered the world of bus transportation.
Our parents never had to pick us up, except for evening and weekend activities. Yes, it was a simpler time, but it is part of the Parents’ Code, never to reveal that to your own kids. I, too, have told my share of stories. Wait, it will soon be your time.
Bill Twibill
Dear Goodie-Goodie,
Growing up in NYC, I had access to a bus pass at 50 cents a month, but my elementary school was only two blocks from where I lived.
In high school and college, I was able to take the subway and walk from the stations. In case you don’t know, there are not a lot of hills or mountains in Manhattan, except for some modest beauties in Central Park, and if there was a major snowfall (i.e., the 1947 blizzard), NYC was pretty much shut down and we all took our American Fliers to the park and pretended it was Mount Everest.
Steve Leavenworth
Dear Bus Pass,
I was raised in snooty Westchester County, N.Y. You never had to walk more than five or six blocks to catch a bus.
However, I DID walk every day (and I measured the distance on a map) 1.6 miles each way. I didn’t take a bus unless it rained, which it doesn’t in Westchester; it’s not allowed.
On bitter cold days the girls’ legs got frozen. I forgot to mention that girls did not wear pants. All girls wore sweaters and skirts, bobby socks and saddle shoes, the uniform of the day. A few of the snootier girls wore stockings AND bobby sox. There weren’t any such thing as tights.
Boys wore corduroy pants, which gave a sort of rhythm to the walking: zwip, zwip, zwip. We also wore sweaters, shirts without ties and argyle sox with saddle shoes.
No one wore hats, although girls would often wear kerchiefs. Incidentally, girls carried all their books in front against their chests with both arms unless they could find some sucker in love to carry them; boys carried books on the hip. I have no idea how that started. I never saw a book bag.
Casper Kranenburg
Dear Bus Pass:
When I was young, I lived in a country where walking or riding a bicycle were the only ways of getting to and from school.
Cars were prohibited for students even in high school. We walked in summer heat and in winter cold, traversed through snow banks, dodged cars, found shortcuts through people’s backyards and actually enjoyed getting drenched in Dutch rainstorms.
So, don’t lose your pass but think about walking every once and a while – it may do you good!
Roioli Schweiker
Dear Lucky (you never lost your pass),
I never rode a bus to school; nobody drove me – I always had to walk, even in the snow. But in those days, people did a good job of shoveling their sidewalks. It would be nice if they did it in Concord, instead of piling the driveway snow up in the sidewalk so you HAVE to walk unsafely in the street.
When I was in junior high we moved to the top of a hill, which was scenic, but steep, although it was only uphill coming home. In high school, the distance was over a mile, and had the hill at the end, of course.
