Too many afternoons to count, Dad, Neil D. Greene, would take his place in a comfortable chair
and start, in Mom's words, to "scribble about the BACK TIMES". Often, he could be observed chuckling
to himself about an incident remembered from those days of Crawford and Grant counties, the homestead
where he spent his youth and the geographical center of the rest of his years. I rescued his yellowed
pages that Mom had carefully tucked away, long ago forgotten, barely readable but his handwriting is a
lot like mine, so with time I was able to put them together to be published...there is too much
"as it really was" history and humor on those pages to be lost to recycling. So, I would like to
share these historically accurate memories with you and generations to come. Let your mind wander
to a time when life's complications were almost solveable, this one started in 1912, at Hoover
Hollow School, a few miles north of Boscobel, WI. I hope you enjoy and tell others where you found
them.
"SOMETHING, BUT NOT ALL, ABOUT PRIVIES"
Written by NEIL D. GREENE
Rome may have had it's romance, the Polynesians their exotic, and the Orient its
mystique, but to a country school boy of the early 1900's, all else would pale before the privy,
the American pioneer john. This truly American rustic treasure may have varied in size from the
one-holer to the three-holer, but the shape, the form, and the aroma gave it uniqueness. Even
the casual observer could not mistake it for a miniature woodshed, chicken coop, or well
house.
Preschool experience did not properly introduce the unworldly country lad to the
complexities of sexual segregation in the country school which mandated a privy for boys and a
privy for girls. In most cases it wasn't considered requisite to label for identification; this was
subtly accomplished by the perennials of the student body, many of whom spent a desultory
decade mastering the intellectual requirements of grade II but were hip on privy identification.
Said perennials established the pattern by first a two-or-one fingered appeal to the teacher,
depending on the nature of the urgency or the degree of boredom of the book and then a hasty
trek to the proper privy. Even the dullest dolt, ever anxious to learn the ways of the learned, got
the message. This is to be noted as the origin of the aims of socialized learning-learn by doing-
do what you can do best when you want to do it. Research later designates this as the
Montessori Method.
The boy's privy was pretty special or as we said in the 60's, groovy. It was usually
missing a seat board, the clapboard walls bore evidence of an abiding interest in the opposite
sex, such as diamond-shaped designs, and then there were those forunners of 20th century
memorabilia, the four letter words. Then there were the somber ashy-gray splashings on the
clapboard walls and seat board, if one existed, mute evidence of repeated errant urination
which marked the naughty or misdirected boy whose goals have not been clearly defined.
The catalogue or catalog, if one prefers the mod, was an integral segment of the privy.
Whether suspended from a rusty spike or lying disheveled on the spattered floor, this godsend
to the rural housewife and privy-goer, did dual duty. The non-glossed portions did yeoman
service in its day as a toilet necessity and the glossed portions (not recommended for handy-
wipes) with its glowing color illustrations and large print provided a valuable resource for
learning while doing. As in all fields of human relations there must exist some disagreement; so it
was with the catalog; whose turn was it to replace the exhausted catalog once the toilet-
oriented portions were depleted? Since there was no organized rotation system, the lot usually
fell to children of those families of some real substance whose affluence had extended to
Montgomery Ward in addition to Sears Roebuck. There was a further area of difference as to
the relative merits of the larger Montgomery Ward page as compared with the convenience of
the smaller but more efficient Sears Roebuck wipe.
A catastrophe of major proportions struck the Hoover Hollow School during the year
of the great uprising. It was a discrimination-oriented rebellion that emerged with the boys'
discovery of the inequities existing between the girls' and boys' privies. Aroused by a sense of
honest curiosity, a select group of the more courageous bumpkins decided to invade the inner
sanctum of the girls' privy to satisfy once and for all time and for all boy mankind, the need to
discover what indeed lay inside the hallowed walls of the girls' potty cottage. The committee-
select plans included concealing themselves in the nearby ditch until teach had completed her
cleaning, dusting, and departure, and then the secret entry.
The plan was an astounding success but the end result could be disastrous. The
investigating committee's high expectancy of finding radical departures in interior form and
design was sorely blunted. There just wasn't all that much difference, but what the boys did find
was a well scrubbed seat board, all intact with no urine splashings, no missing or splintered
boards, and with smooth even cut-outs for milady's sitting pleasure. There were no markings on
the walls, only Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward cut outs of baby cribs, frilled
unmentionables, and other subtleties suggestive of the maternal instinct.
Any self-respecting 1914 model country bumpkin with any anti-female dignity
whatsoever, would and did set out herewith to bring equality to this male-female privy status.
Such a ruckus developed from the utter destruction as a result of our rebellion that the school
board called up an ad hoc committee of its three members to investigate, if indeed, a rebellion
had taken place. Their findings led to the appointment of a committee on construction, chosen
from the three member board, and six months later sure enough, that summer, between log
cutting and oat harvesting, the three member farmer school board had erected a new boy privy,
complete with siding and seat boards, a three-holer to boot. There was still no written
identification but everybody, even the County Superintendent, knew which privy was the boys'.
