Goodbye, Miss Turlock

This short can be found as an extra on the DVD for the Ricardo Montalban and Esther Williams film "Fiesta".

This Oscar-winning short is from MGM's 'Passing Times' series by John Nesbitt. These films tend to look back fondly at the 'good 'ol days'--with very a idealized view of America.

In this installment, the narrator (Nesbitt) talks glowingly about life in the one-room schoolhouse. It also focuses on Miss Turlock--the teacher in this school. It's all very sentimental and very well made. Though, I must admit, also very slight and overly idealized--making the one-room schoolhouse seem like the best darn form of education ever created.

By the way, watch the spitball on the blackboard. It will appear and disappear and appear again due to some continuity problems.

My mother taught in a one-room schoolhouse in Iowa, in the 1940s. Several years ago we drove to the spot where the schoolhouse was, to find it had been torn down.

Each morning she had to arrive early to the freezing building to light a coal stove for the children who would arrive later.

These schoolhouses were the centers of their communities.

I remember this film when I saw it in the 1950s, as a short accompanying the major feature. It stuck with me, not knowing at the time that my mother taught at one. And so after several google searches I found it, 60 years later, on YouTube.

It is sentimental, of course, but nothing wrong with that. And it contains the stereotype of the "old maid" schoolteacher. My mother wasn't an old maid, as the fact of my existence proves. There were few jobs that women could have all of their lives back then other than teaching school.

We have decided to show this to our grandchildren, to give them an idea of something that their great grandmother did. We think it will mean something to them.

Miss Turlock is presented as compassionate and wise. And a good teacher. It was a life to be proud of.

A sweet little film depicting a part of rural life in the first half of the Twentieth Century.

One of John Nesbitt's best Passing Parade short subjects this one pays tribute to the one room rural schoolhouse which after World War 2 and the development of the superhighways made it a thing of the past. I've always wondered myself what the typical school day with all the grades being taught in the same 6 hour day I had.

No dialog for the characters, but character actress Nana Bryant plays Miss Turlock who never marries, but devotes her life to putting knowledge in young minds in her small community. As another reviewer said, so many more careers would have been open to her in this day and age.

One of the best of the Passing Parades series.

1948 was a year for strong women. Loretta Young won the Best Actress Oscar for THE FARMER'S DAUGHTER, beating out (among others) Ingrid Bergman as Joan of Arc. This typically sentimental "Our Passing Parade" short about an old-maid teacher in a one-room schoolhouse, played by Nana Bryant, won the Best One-Reel Movie Award.

Like all of the Passing Parade short subjects, it was written and narrated by John Nesbitt. Nesbitt would tell you what was going on, even as the performers proceeded to perform their actions. It's an old technique from silent movies, called "Animated Text" and it required good humor, a strong sense of irony and good writing, lest it turn into that bane of all narrated cartoons, "Radio With Pictures." Fortunately, it has those.

By the way, in checking the Oscar competition for 1948, I noticed that the best cartoon was TWEETIE PIE. I'm not sure how that fits into the "strong women" thought in the first paragraph.

This film is really about two subjects rolled into one short. One is how the one room schoolhouse, once so ubiquitious across America, was becoming a thing of the past by the post War era as highways began to join all parts of the country and the returning GIs and their families chose to settle in suburban tract houses near cities where jobs were plentiful.

John Nesbitt narrated and wrote this short, so who knows if it is precisely his experience or not, although the outfits of the children and the schoolteacher make it look a bit before his time. Mr. Nesbitt was actually born in 1910 and these outfits look like it IS 1910.

Besides nostalgia for the intimacy of the small group educated in the one room school house - the plaque on the door says it was founded in 1902 - there is nostalgia for the school's teacher - Miss Turlock. Nesbitt talks about how she was firm, how she seemed to have eyes in the back of her head and nothing got past her, but how she tempered justice with compassion, even being understanding with rule breakers if she thought they had learned their lesson, and particularly gentle with the kid who was a bit slow in the classroom.

The finale shows the school closing in 1940, and since it was only open for 38 years, it is likely Miss Turlock was its only teacher. As a result, all of her students pile into the single room school to say goodbye to her on her final day, their very presence probably meaning so much to her.

The final scene shows the aged Miss Turlock, taking a final look at where she has spent the last 40 years of her life, and the short says "maybe this homely spinster was not so childless and alone after all." I mean - Yikes!. Harsh words, but true for the time. The people who taught school prior to 1970 were largely single educated women since other professions that they might have chosen were closed to them.

I'd recommend this as an interesting if somewhat sentimental look at a bygone institution.