Chesterbrook School. The main entrance was at the junction of original building (left) and new wing (right). Playground equipment in the foreground. There was a cafeteria but I remember everybody eating lunch at their desks in the classroom from their lunch boxes (Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, Superman...) and thermoses whose glass liners would shatter on the least impact. I supposed most people were too poor to pay for lunch. Later on I did eat in the cafeteria; it was staffed by farm ladies who prepared delicious home-cooked meals just like those served on the farm. Once they made corn fritters and I pestered my Mom for weeks to make them and finally I guess she tracked down the cook and found out how. About lunches... A 1951 handout shows that the cafeteria served a plate lunch; it cost 25 cents, plus 5 cents for milk (however I remember bringing four pennies for milk each day). The school also had to start charging for books due to the huge influx of new students, for which it had not received commensurate funding. School started with first grade, in those days there was no Kindergarten or Pre-K.

Rethinking the cafeteria info... It seems more likely to me now that the cafeteria was in the new wing, so there was no cafeteria at all when I was in the early grades.

In 2024, Ross Bailey, who was at Chesterbrook School the same time I was but a few grades behind, saw this photo and wondered where the Tarzan bars were that he remembered. He enlarged the photo and saw that they behind the swings; CLICK HERE to see them.