Nancy Classics by Ernie Bushmiller for August 31, 2022

Aunt Fritzi first made the scene back in October of 1922 – so she will soon be 100 years old. When Aunt Fritzi first began to appear in newspapers, the world had just been through the First World War and the International Spanish Flu pandemic – so most of the rest of the newspapers in those days were filled up with nothing but bad news! Aunt Fritzi made her debut back in the day when most school were one-room schoolhouses. The one room school houses didn’t begin to be phased out in most rural areas until around 1948 = at least where we lived. So IF this cartoon appeared before the one-room schools were phased out – it would not have been at all unusual for a parent to want to stop and chat with the teacher – and you most likely would have had only one teacher for all twelve grades in one school. Where I grew up, the parents who had kids in school would meet together and choose the teacher – usually a local girl who had gone to the State Capital to take a special test to become certified as a teacher. Most of the teacher salaries included a guaranteed dinner invitation to the home of each of her students one night per student. So if a family had 11 children in school – not unusual in that time period – the teacher could ecxpect to have dinner with that family at least 11 times during the month. If another family had 10 children in school – that would guarantee her of 21 free dinners every month. That also meant that every teacher had plenty of time to become personally acquainted with all the family members of the students in her one-room school house. It would be wonderful if Nancy Classics could include some of the more famous strips featuring Aunt Fritzi over the past 100 years – but my guess is that will not be in the cards for us – what a waste of a perfectly good opportunity to take a look at some truly classic Nancy classics!