As kids, when the weather was dry, we would take a third route to school. We would go into the woods above our place, down a steep hill, across a small creek, and up a path on the other side to Williams Hill.
Williams School was a stately brick building, one story high, built around 1900 and had all wooden floors. The playground area around the school was paved with red bricks but was not fenced off , and on one side was wooded and a steep hill. During games, there was often a scramble to keep stray balls from rolling down the hill.
Each day, school opened with the Pledge of Allegiance and a scriptural reading from the Bible. At the close of school each day, we would wait until the loud speaker in the hall played a John Philip Sousa march and we would march out of our classes two-by-two to the dismissal area to walk home. There were no school buses at that time. There was also no cafeteria and all students carried their lunch.
Unlike the system today, schools in the 1930s didn't offer any special help to the slower students, You either kept up or were left behind. I don't feel there were as many discipline problems then as today. In the Williams School area, most of the parents had a limited education, with coal mine, mill or farm jobs, and wanted something better for their children.
All the teachers were women, and female teachers were not expected to get married. If they did, they were expected to resign. Somehow, in those days, it was felt that it was not proper for a women teacher to be married.
The teacher I remember most clearly was Miss Woodward. She encouraged the students and never missed a chance to praise good work. We didn't have all the fancy teaching aids of today, but we did learn our geography, spelling and history.
We had a weekly Current Events period when we would receive a small four-paged printed pamphlet with pictures which summarized world happenings of the previous week. Each student was expected to give an oral report on one of the news items at this period.
Mrs. Woodward took time each day to talk about the world happenings, such as the rise of Hitler in Germany, and the event which took place in 1936 and was called the "Crime of the Century" - the kidnapping of the Lindberg baby.
After his solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927, Charles Lindberg had become a national hero. The baby was kidnapped by someone entering the second-floor nursery on a homemade ladder and demanding a ransom. The man who was caught and accused of the murder when they found the dead baby was Bruno Richard Hautmann, and he was tried, convicted and sentenced to death.
Mrs. Woodward asked one day if anyone knew why the execution had not taken place when scheduled. As an avid newspaper reader of the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph by this time, I had followed the full coverage each day. I can still remember the answer I gave: "The executioner is only available to the state of New Jersey on alternate Fridays." She commended me on my answer and the "big" words in such a way that I still remember those exact words over sixty years later.
The first school we attended was Williams Elementary School, grades 1 through 6. It was located about a quarter of mile away on Williams Hill, and was one of three elementary schools in Monongahela. There was a very steep grade on the road from Main Street up to the school. The school could also be accessed by a long series of concrete and stone steps, landings and ramps up the side of the hill from Main Street.
Instead of going down the yard from our place to Jones St. and then Main St., and on over to the bottom of the hill of the school, we would take a shortcut through an alley called Short Street from Jones St. This would take us past a junkyard in the valley between our hill and Williams Hill, then up a sloped path on the side of the hill to Williams Hill. (In those days, people walking from Williams Hill to town would take this dirt path as a shortcut.) Once there, it was a level walk to the far side where the school was located.