For generations that old school building stood on the northeast corner of the intersection two miles north and one mile east of Manning. (For real old-timers, Nellie Lynch's corner) At that time it was one of a network of rural schools planted every two miles in each direction through the countryside. Those schools were symbols of the dedication of rural Iowans to provide for their children a quality education.
The old school perhaps never knew an enrollment of more than 25 students per year, but it surely seemed like an enormous place to me as a child. When I think of those events like the Christmas program when a wire stretched across the room held a couple of bed sheets for a stage curtain and white gas mantle lamps hanging from ceiling hooks provided light, and all the school families gathered to watch the students perform, the memory assumes Carnegie Hall proportions. Now when I pause on the sidewalk during each return visit to Manning, the old place seems just too small, somehow.

During the Manning Centennial, a high school reunion was held. It was enjoyable to bask in the noise of happy greetings and cries of remembrance, but for me there was another, quieter reunion. Walking around Elmer's garage one morning I could almost see and hear Gary and Linda Handlos, Stan and Ken Spies, Ruth, Laurel and Cleo Singsank, Larry and Darlene Genzen, Betty Lengemann and all the others with whom I shared those rooms. I could hear Golda Sander, Loretta Lersson, and Irma Bromert as they taught.

I remembered when some older boys decided that the furnace was the proper disposal place for a pile of sweeping compound, causing the immediate evacuation of the building. I saw the coat hooks hung with snow-wet clothes and the crockery water cooler in the little hallway, and the basement drain that backed up in wet weather. I could smell the oiled floor and the coal furnace. I saw Jack Mohr and Glenn Singsank's carved initials still visible in the siding above the place where the storm celler once lay.

I certainly don't suggest a mass pilgrimmage across the current owner's lawn to view the old schoolhouse, but in the words of a former Carroll merchant, "If you can't stop, smile as you go by." Ask a former student of a rural school or a former teacher like Evelyn Antone about rural school education. Ask them about outhouses in January, or movies in the high school gym with the county superintendant, or eighth grade graduation in Carroll.

Rural schools had their limitations, but we got a good education; and we farm boys would have rather stood by the schoolyard fence watching Alfred Ahrendsen plowing with his new John Deere tractor than to play dodge ball during recess anyway.