I was asked recently if I am a lifelong resident of Brookfield. Unlike my adoptive father, Stanley Gurski, who was born in the house that once occupied the site of the Assembly of God Church, I could best be described as a long-time resident. It was not until my mother married Stanley that we moved to Brookfield. I was seven years old.
I was born in Danbury Hospital, and for the first six years of my life lived in Danbury and for a short time in Bethel.
I remember walking with my grandmother from our house on Prospect Street to the stores on Main Street, the major shopping area for the city in those days before malls. You could find almost anything you wanted on Main Street, from grocery stores to shoe stores. Main Street was also where the movie theaters, library, post office and Hotel Green were. Main Street’s stores and sidewalks were social gathering places, where friends and neighbors would meet while shopping or having a bite to eat at a store’s lunch counter.
I loved sidewalks. Even as a young child, I could walk safely by myself to visit my friends down the street. After school and on weekends, my grandmother would only need to watch out the window to make sure I arrived at my destination.
I attended first grade at Sacred Heart School, and walked to school every day, following a path through a neighbor’s yard. The school was located one street away so it wasn’t a long walk, and I was never alone because other children also used the shortcut. When I was older and visited my grandmother, I would sometimes follow the sidewalk around the entire block so I could walk by the school, trying to remember my year there or the names of children I knew then.
I still don’t remember much about my first grade experience except that it was the year when I caught most of the childhood illnesses and was absent a lot. It was also a year of change in my life when we moved to Brookfield.
Here in Brookfield, I had to walk to the Consolidated School (now Center School) from our farm on Obtuse Hill Road. What was new to this child of the city was that there were no sidewalks. The only sidewalk was the one that still runs along Route 25 in Brookfield Center and up Long Meadow Hill Road. It was strange to me to walk along the side of the road with no protective sidewalk.
The Consolidated School was opened in 1938 and replaced one-room schoolhouses located throughout the town. The school as it appears today includes additions, the one on the western side, was being constructed when I was in eighth grade. That addition was built on the site of one of our playgrounds.
Several years ago I took my grandson Jonathan to the open house for the addition constructed on the eastern side of the school. I wanted him to see where I went to school for seven years, but I don’t think he was impressed. It was just another school building to him.
To me, it was a quest for my past. What I sought, as we walked through the hallways, was the little Consolidated School of my memories in the midst of the new, larger, more modern Center School. Sadly for me, there was little to find that was familiar. Among many other changes, my sixth grade classroom and our school’s little library had been swallowed up in the additions; the playgrounds on both sides of the school had disappeared.
I remember playing on the rocks near the ball field on the eastern side of the school. I and other little girls also played “house” among the trees nearby. Before that addition was built, I remember wondering if the small rock walls we built to resemble rooms still existed, and if they were used for the same purpose by other little girls all those years later.
When I attended the Consolidated School, there were classrooms encompassing first to eighth grade. My eighth grade class numbered 31 students at the time of our graduation. I would imagine that the other seven grades had a similar number of children so there were probably less than 300 students in the entire school.
The Consolidated School had a gymnasium that also served as an auditorium. Our eighth grade graduation was held there. There was no music room, and I remember the music teacher wheeling the piano into the classroom when it was our turn for class. We also had dancing lessons. It was there I had my first introduction to square dancing, which I learned to love.
There was a just a touch of home economics, in that we girls had a “sewing” session. I don’t know what the boys did during that time. The only thing I do know is that I never sewed a stitch and no one, much less the teacher, seemed to care.
Unlike today, the Consolidated School was the only primary school in Brookfield.. There was no high school. Following eighth grade, students either attended Danbury High School, Newtown High School, Henry Abbott Technical School or private school for grades nine to 12.
Eighth grade was the last year I walked to school. I had learned to love walking on the side of the road, where we could pick bittersweet or wildflowers for our teacher on our way, rather than through a neighbor’s yard or on a sidewalk. Those years were now over. For the next four years, I would wait in front of my grandmother’s house with my cousin Helen for the bus that would take us to Danbury High School.
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