Bill Polley, Moe and the school bell
Tue, 04/14/2015 - 12:01pm
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By:
Dr. Marilyn G. Klug, granddaughter of Bill Polley
The accompanying pictures were taken by Piney Edwards and courtesy of Gerald (Jerry) Polley, son of Bill Polley.
Bill Polley was janitor of the McIntosh school from 1935 to 1964. He got the job at the height of the depression and worked hard to keep it. Bill did more than keeping the school clean, he did repairs, such as replacing the gym floor with strips of solid oak he cut and fit himself.
He also decided the sidewalks were too long for shoveling, so he build a snow blower to keep them clean in the winter. He even made modifications like adding a single coal hopper for the furnace to make it easier to feed coal into the furnace.
He had a lot of help from his eight children, LaVerne, Lyle, Victor, Howard, Ruth, Marlene, Merrill (Moe), and Gerald (Jerry). It was expected that after school his kids would stay behind and help clean the day’s dirt.
They pushed wide brooms up and down the endless miles of hallways; scraped buckets of gum off of desks, window sills, and doorways; cleaned erasers until their hands turned white and shoveled coal until their hands turned black; washed and scrubbed and painted, all for no pay. Well, Jerry, the youngest, finally did get paid for summer work, and paid fairly well.
But it was boring work, certainly not how a teenager wanted to spend an afternoon. This was probably felt more by Moe than any of the kids. One day Bill asked Moe to “clean out all that scrap iron in the basement and sell it in Erskine.”
So, Moe loaded up all the scrap iron into the truck. On top of his load he added an old school bell. It had originally been a bell from a country school nearby that had closed. The McIntosh school wanted to use it an ornament. But to Moe it was scrap iron, so he drove to Erskine with the bell and all the other iron and sold the whole lot.
Luckily, the people in Erskine recognized that the bell probably shouldn’t have been sold to them so they called the school and the bell was returned. All Moe would say of the event was, “It wasn’t my fault, I misunderstood.” From then on the family would always call that bell, “Moe’s bell.”