Goodbye, Miss Turlock

This is a feel-good short about a teacher in a one-room school. I have no idea why it won an Oscar (one reel short). Maybe it was lack of competition. There is nothing really wrong with the film, but nothing terribly right with it either. I saw this on TCM during the "31 Days of Oscar" series. It will almost certainly be shown on TCM at least once in February in future years.

Goodbye, Miss Turlock (1948)

*** (out of 4)

Oscar-winning short has an adult (narration by John Nesbitt) looking back at his childhood where he was taught by a stern teacher in a one-room school. This is a pretty good short as it does a very good job at showing how an adult can look back at his childhood with fond memories of something small yet that thing might have meant the world to them. This film is also a social commentary as we get a few punches thrown about various highways that are going up and cutting into the old country school, which allowed kids to be taught by the same person throughout their young lives. Nana Bryant, a veteran of over one-hundred films, does a nice job in her role even though she doesn't have a single line of dialogue. The film runs a short 12-minutes but there's enough kindness in the film to make it worth viewing.

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.

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.

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.