There's nothing quite so satisfying as an old joke told between old friends that's brought to light again 50, 60 or even 70 years later.

"Do you remember that teacher, Lloyd Taylor?" Paul Clark asked his friend Ray McAnallen at the Country School Reunion at Jackson Center Community Park. "He would send out to get water for the toilet and say, 'Get out sir, yes sir, I say sir," Clark recounted, laughing. "And then he'd take his big fist and rap you on the head and say, 'I say sir, get to studying.' ''

Nearly 70 students and teachers who remember attending one of Jackson Center and Jackson Township's nine country schools gathered Sunday for the yearly school reunion. It's been organized by Bill Zahniser and his wife since 1990.

Once they all get together and the pot luck lunch is starting to digest, the memories start to flow.

Zahniser said his memories are sometimes painful.

"Just thinking about it makes my knuckles hurt," he said. "Our teacher had this thick ruler that she would crack on our knuckles if we misbehaved."

Pauline Rose taught at the one-room Cass Ridge school and later at the "big" school at Jackson Center. The Jackson Center School had two floors and boasted two teachers conducting classes.

It's the one-room school that she's quickest to tell tales about. Flanked by two of her former students, Wanetta Robinson and Marvin Andrusky, she talked about her two years, from 1943 to 1945, as teacher, superintendent and janitor of the Cass Ridge school.

"Most of the country schools only had three windows on each side," she said, showing off a new enlargement of the old schoolhouse. "But ours had four."

The teacher told how she shepherded 30 students in eight grades through the day.

"I taught 45 different classes each day," she said. "Now they talk about teaching ahead and going back to reinforce learning. We were doing that then."

With children from all eight grades listening in on the other's classes, everyone learned something slightly ahead of their level, and everyone got a review of their classes from the year before, she said.

Andrusky, one of her students, remembered walking to school in the winter.

"Our mothers would bundle us up in so many clothes we'd waddle like penguins," he laughed. "Then, when we'd get to school, we'd hang our mittens and gloves and things in front of the fireplace."

That fire was built by students like Helen Hanelly Feather. When she was 11, she built the fire in the schoolhouse each day before the rest of the students came to class. Her salary: $1 a month.

The Hazzard school she attended didn't have a pump nearby. Instead, each day, a student would go down to Zahniser's mother's house with a bucket for water.

"Can you imagine carrying a bucket of water back in the winter?" Mrs. Feather asked. "We each brought our own cake of soap and water glass, and we had to be sure to wash our hands before lunch."

At one point, there were seven one-room schools in Jackson Township, in addition to the Jackson Center School: the Cape Horn, Cass Ridge, Center, Hazzard, Hodge, Jones and Paoli schools.

You can e-mail Herald Staff Writer Amanda Smith-Teutsch at: ateutsch@sharonherald.com