Two sketches of women inside an old schoolwork binder

This is a post that has me remembering and reminiscing back nearly four years to the Old Geography Book Doodles, Part 1 and Part 2.

Instead of being inside a textbook, today's sketches/doodles are inside the two-ringer binder (pictured at right) of a long-ago student.

The printing on the front of the binder states "VALOR LOOSE LEAF NOTE BOOK." It is filled with the handouts and notes belonging to Esther Koontz in the mid to late 1940s.

The wide variety of topics she studied includes:

• Eighteenth century English poetry
• Hamlet
• Book reports on Anne Snow, Mountain Nurse; Dynamo Farm: A 4-H Story; and The Dim Lantern
• A vocabulary unit that included admonition, carcass, confederate, consternation, contrivance and decorum
• Macbeth
• Vegetables (including 38 study questions)
• Home Economics (Breadmaking, frozen desserts, table centerpieces and cake baking)
• Making a tuffet (it took 122 hours and cost $16.26 in materials)
• The Federal Reserve System
• Names of some important newspapers
• Democracy
• Conservation and reclamation
• Taxes
• Colors
• Introductory drafting
• History of health

Compare and contrast that to some of today's secondary school curriculums. Better yet, don't. You might become depressed.

At least, through all of this impressive and (mostly) useful learning, there was still time for doodling. Here are the two illustrated pages from the back of the binder. These were done, apparently, by Kathryn Shoemaker, not Esther.

Esther and Kathryn, by the way, were likely from the nearby area of Hanover, Pennsylvania. Both of their names appear in an April 1949 edition of The Evening Sun, Hanover's newspaper.