At Saint Columba, there was “division”: taught in our arithmetic class.
(I remember telling an older sister how impressed by myself I was that we were tackling “long division” in 4th grade; she burst my bubble by telling me “Wait until you learn to divide bigger numbers into smaller numbers.” Hurt, all I could say was, “That's impossible!”)
Then there were “divisions”: the means by which we got home from school and the subject of this sketch.
Like my sisters before me, I walked home from school in the "Snelling Division" guided by “police boys”. They did not guide all the way to my front door. From the school at Blair and Hamline we walked west across Hamline, and immediately north across Blair before turning west on Blair Avenue toward Snelling. At each crossing street along the way we would peel off individually to our homes. At each crossing one police boy would hoist his yellow, metal stop sign for the group to continue safely, and, if somebody was peeling off to the south, the other police boy would hoist his sign to stop cars on Blair.
The second street we crossed was Pascal. That is where I peeled off from the two orderly lines of neighbor kids and walked myself the short block to my home, three houses west of Pascal on Van Buren. The other kids continued on.
A few kids lived west of Snelling which was what I then called a “big street”—the kind of street which was the last I was allowed to cross on my own without holding the hand of a parent or older sibling. There, the two confident police boys —wearing their Sam-Brown belts with badges at their chests—would look for a reasonable break in traffic, step out in front of both lanes, hoist their stop signs, and signal for the kids to cross when all looked safe. Then they would head off to their own homes. I know, because in 7th grade I was one of the police boys leading the Snelling Division.
At noon, a smaller group of us would head home for lunch in the same fashion. (Some years I took a bag or lunch-pail-lunch to school. Some years I did not.) I remember one day arriving from St. Columba at Albert and Blair. Either I was headed home from my morning kindergarten or, a year or two later, home for lunch. There was a huge crowd of students of Wilson High School surrounding the whole intersection blocking our way. (Wilson took up the whole block along the south side of Blair between Albert and Pascal streets.) The assistant principal of the high school and one student were in a shouting match in the middle of the intersection. The assistant principal was trying to send the student home because he had worn jeans to school that day—prohibited by the dress code.
My classmate, Deanna Nagle, remembers Jim Dueber hitting her with a snow ball while we were walking in the Snelling Division one winter day. Jim remembers it as an unlucky accident. The incident illustrates that we were not a military parade but kids toddling home, having a bit of fun along the way.
The school had no choice but trust us to walk ourselves, unescorted, safely to school in the morning. However, it stationed police boys as outposts at the major intersections to help kids cross safely in the morning. I covered the outpost during the winter of 8th grade right in front of the school at Hamline and Blair. However, when the temperature got to twenty or thirty degrees below zero we could duck in behind the front door of the school until we saw a student arrive at the crossing. I still shiver to think about those who covered one of the outer-outposts, like the one at Snelling and Blair, during the Minnesota winter. Yet the police boys were there every day, early, and long enough to be able to hustle to school before classes began.
Despite my fond memories and lasting amazement at the organization and trust that went into our daily journeys between St. Columba and home, these memories do not quite match my fondness for memories of how the journeys began inside the school building. I sometimes ask my 21st century "Alexa" device to play me John Phillips Sousa music. For that music recaptures some of the excitement of lining up in our classroom and filing out in perfect order as the divisions came magically together in the hallways of St. Columba.
A bell rang. We had some time to go to our cloakroom to put on our seasonal jackets and such. John Philip Sousa Music sounded loudly from a record player near the principal's office. In each classroom we would move to stand in our assigned places depending on our division. Group by group we would file into the hallway behind our lead police boy and behind the kids from classrooms who had joined before us.
There were two main hallways on two floors. The divisions had numbers. Those that had the longest distance to walk had the lowest numbers. This is vague. I am not sure, but let me guess that there was University Division as number 1, Lexington as number 2, our Snelling Division as number three, and a Hamline Division as number four (It had only two blocks to go). My sister Dolores remembers that buzzers were sounded to signal when the designated police boy should begin the procession of each division down the hallway. To get the signal to the second floor, Dolores had to lean over a half wall near the top of the main stairway to the second floor, receive a hand signal from below, go to the buzzer nearby, and sound the call on that floor: three buzzer pushes for the third division, for example.
It worked flawlessly. The march music added an excitement that continued through 9 years and that returns as I write about the Divisions of St. Columba.
Not of St. Columba nor from the 1950s, but these photos capture some of the 'feel
note: a good piece about the circa-1920 origins of the police boys (school safety patrol) in St. Paul, https://www.mnopedia.org/thing/origins-school-safety-patrol-1921
(c) from date of posting, by Bob Komives, Fort Collins
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