Another Story About Piqua, Ohio

Here is something else I remember about Piqua, Ohio. Ohio used to have lots of small and large manufacturing plants and Piqua used to have an old many storied brick building that was built as an underwear manufacturing plant. Yep, BVD's for men were made there.

Now would you believe this. Our fifth/sixth grade teacher who was a Roman Catholic nun teaching at Russia Local School arranged a school field trip to this plant to show us students how things got made in manufacturing plants. We learned all about division of labor as it pertained to making BVD's! One lady sewed the front, one sewed the band and one sewed the label on the band. Others cut fabric for the BVD's and still others packaged the finished products.

By the way the reason I labeled this teacher as the fifth/sixth grade teacher is that we had 55 students stuffed into this normal size classroom. Half were fifth graders and half were sixth graders. Can you imagine being that poor teacher with so many students and so little in the way of resources! No wonder the Russia School District quickly passed a bond levy and additional classrooms were built onto the "high school building" of the Russia Local School. My father was on the school board of Russia Local School at the time and I distinctly remember him bringing home curtain samples for the windows of the new addition.

Now as Paul Harvey would have said "Here's the rest of the story. But my teacher was a Catholic nun which meant two things: one, she was strict and tough and not above taking a ruler to your knuckles for misbehavior and two, by golly by the grace of God you were going to learn to read, write and do arithmetic! Plus get exposed to history, literature, music, art and religion.

But can you imagine today if a teacher arranged a trip to an underwear plant for elementary school kids. Victoria's Secret here we come. Why I imagine that there would be a public outrage. Why I just read this week of two incidents where students were suspended for doing something very human----passing gas and creating a little stink!

But remember we were under the watchful eye of our Catholic nun so no inappropriate behavior developed. Oh, but if she could have just read our little minds!