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Broken Bow, Nebraska

75 years later: Bow's Class of 1931 remembers together

The Class of 1931 celebrated its 75th high school reunion over the weekend, with five of the remaining eight members gathering at the Tumbleweed Friday to recall long-ago times. Pictured from left are Carla Linville, Leona McCaslin, Frances Hill, Burnard Whitney and Lera Gibson Taylor.

By KERRI REMPP
Chief managing editor

Time equals change, and no one in Broken Bow this last weekend knows that better than the members of the Class of 1931 who gathered to celebrate their 75th high school reunion.

Carla Linville, Leona McCaslin, Frances Hill, Burnard Whitney and Lera Gibson Taylor are five of the eight surviving members of the Broken Bow Class of 1931. They spent Friday afternoon remembering life in a different time and comparing it to the experiences of those growing up today.

The group, all in their 90s, all grew up in the country and didn't enter school in town until they were in high school. Memories of riding horses to town or driving manual transmission vehicles and killing the engine at each stop are still clear in their minds.

Hill entered "town school" after passing the 14 eighth grade exams as a seventh grader. The exams were required in order to qualify for free tuition, she said. She took them early at the suggestion of her teacher and skipped eighth grade.

Algebra presented particular problems for all of the friends, as the country schools at that time didn't teach it. "I just stumbled through it," Taylor recalls.

One science teacher also stands out in their minds. McCaslin said the teacher asked a question and no one answered. Soon, she heard him calling her name and scolding her for not answering when called upon.
"He was so cross-eyed I thought he was looking at someone else," she laughed.
That remark instantly brought forth "you must be talking about Mr. Sterner" comments from the rest of the group.

But memories of school and changes in education are not the only thing the group remembered. They saw the development of the Custer County roads, saw electricity distributed to the rural areas of the county and had their lives changed with the availability of the telephone and other modern conveniences.
There was a time in all of their lives when transportation was limited, indoor plumbing was a distant dream and electricity an invention with untapped potential.

Life today in the rural areas of Custer County is vastly different, Whitney said, with its 24-row planters, crawler tractors and GPS planting. Thrashing crews and saving corn to rub to gather seed corn for the next crop are things of the past, Hill added.

There was a time when kids had to have corn shelled in the morning hours so their fathers could plant it in the afternoon. The lucky families owned a hand-crank sheller.
"You can't imagine how people used to live," Taylor said.