The enduring life of a school desk

Has there ever been a more utilitarian and useful piece of furniture than the school desk?

I write this as a stare at an old school desk in the corner of my house's small living room.

If it weren't for the desk having been painted a robin's egg blue at some point in its life, you probably wouldn't notice it. It's positioned between the couch and an 1800s vintage Steinway that takes up about half the room.

I think school desks often have second, third, maybe even fourth lives after they leave the classroom, or at least they used to - but more about that later.

The desk in my living room is small, probably made to accommodate children between first and third grades. It's made of wood in what I would call a block style. It's solid and extremely heavy, probably so the occupant couldn't easily move it around.

This is one of those desks that has an open back and a compartment in which to put your books, papers, lunch, writing instruments and the like. The height of the desktop is about even with the top of my knee.

In the schoolrooms of my youth, these solid wooden desks were usually unpainted and blond in color, probably varnished or covered with a preservative like Deft. Ours came in the robin's egg blue; my wife says she liked the color.

I judge the age of this desk to be sometime in the first third to middle of the 20th Century.

There's a pencil/pen slot carved along the front edge of the top and there's a two-inch diameter hole in the front right corner that was used to hold an inkwell.

I can tell you that inkwells were gone by the time I started to school in September - yes, indeed, September, 1954. Blackboards, big green pencils with half-inch leads and window poles, we had. Inkwells and dip-pens, no.

Desks with holes for inkwells weren't gone by then, however, just the actual inkwells. Heck, my first school, built in 1921 and long since demolished, still had plenty of the old brown desks with slanted tops, wrought iron legs and supports and attached seats, so the back of your seat was the front of the desk behind you. Those were the really old jobs.

Between first and second grade, a new school was built in my town, and all the furniture was new as well. The desks were made of molded metal with some kind of composite/Formica type tops and chairs of similar construction. The teachers' desks were of the same general construction, only bigger, obviously.

The new desktops defied writing or carving, or at least if you succeeded in defeating them and leaving your mark, you would easily be found out.

I really didn't see the older block wooden desks like the one in my living room until I moved to another town just before junior high school.

Parts of that building dated to 1927 and they had many of those blond, block desks, none with holes for inkwells, however, so I suspected most were made around 1953-54 when another part of the building was completed.

Though occasionally supplemented by new metal and composite models, most of those wooden desks stayed around the full six years I spent in this school from seventh through 12th grade (the building was finally taken down in the last couple of years and replaced with a new one). One reason those desks endured, I suspect, is the industrial arts teachers spent their summers making extra money sanding and refinishing and repairing the most beat up ones. The teachers, who usually had a few student helpers hanging around with nothing else better to do with their summers, were quite proud of their work, too.

We came by the desk in our living room through one of several purchases my wife made at an antique shop that used to be along Harford Road in Benson. I suspect the desk didn't come from a Harford County public school, however, because I've heard too many stories (and maybe even wrote one or two way back when) about old school desks being sent to the dump for burial.

Our desk has an empty flower vase and an old cheese crock on it right now, but during the winter it is home to several of my wife's orchids, which spend the summers on our screened front porch. Inside the desk are a few artist tablets that look like they've been there awhile.

"It's a great little desk," my wife said when I asked her about it.

It certainly is.