LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Two Stories by Martin Cothran
hen my wife and I v isit my mother and stepfather, we often duck out to g o for a walk in nearby H olton, a beautiful old town that lies on the prairie in eastern K ansas. We park along the street, walk the neig hborhoods, and then poke around in a few of the shops in the old town square. The town is v ery proud of its heritag e. Established in 1 8 5 7 , it supported the farming community around it, and the antique stores are full of hundred- yearold pictures that detail a thriv ing prairie town full of banks, barber shops, and small g rocery stores. On our last v isit to my mother' s we ag ain went to H olton, and as we walked along we noticed my stepfather' s construction v an parked in front of a block of old two- story building s. One front door standing wide open rev ealed a thin stairway leading up. I called up the stairs and he called back for us to come on up. We climbed up the steep staircase to the top landing , which led to lofts on the left and the rig ht. In one were the making s of a new apartment, newly framed, the kitchen and bathrooms fitted for the installation of modern appliances. The other had yet to be dealt with. The floors were littered with early-twentieth-century debris—pieces of wood, windows, and cornices. My stepfather was working for a friend who had boug ht sev eral of these old building s, helping her restore them to something of their former g lory. While in many places older building s hav e been bulldozed and replaced by uglier and flimsier structures, this was a grueling but worthwhile effort to not only sav e but to restore something old and beautiful. H e showed us the new windows installed on the wall facing the square—windows that had been desig ned to precisely resemble the windows shown in pictures of the building from 1 91 0 . S uch windows are expensiv e now, of course, as is most of the work that has to be done to restore building s like this. H e made a point to show us how much more skillfully made the older fixtures were than those
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Letter from the Editor
now av ailable at the local home improv ement store. H e kicked a board at his feet. " Look at this board," he said. " Notice anything about it? " We could only stare blankly. " There are no knots in any of this wood. When they built building s and houses back then, the boards had to be perfect. No knots. B oards with knots were used to build barns." One after another he pointed to the quality of the scrap pieces of wood scattered about, of the arched frame of a door, of the brickwork on the walls. These were not building s for the rich or the priv ileg ed, but for common residents and shopkeepers. H e explained that some of the wood and the cornices had endured and could be reused, ancient as they were, but that other thing s would hav e to be replaced with newer, lower- quality v ersions. Thoug h it would be impossible to remake these structures perfectly, the approximation would still hav e something of its orig inal integ rity. We tend to look down on the past. We priz e all the thing s we hav e now that prev ious g enerations did not have, but we seldom reflect on what they had that we do not or on the thing s we hav e that are not of the quality they once were. We need to ask ourselv es whether education is among those thing s and whether, instead of bulldoz ing the orig inal idea of education and replacing it with some newer, lower- quality v ersion, we need rather to rebuild and restore the ideal of education that once prev ailed—that of helping our students become better human beings. We can nev er fully restore the education of a hundred years ag o, but we can— and should—take some of the materials, refurbish them, and, ev en thoug h we' ll hav e to use a few knotted boards, reconstruct the kind of education that nourishes a child' s soul. MemoriaPress.com
