Updates

Researching on eBay, I find that if you want your very own Little Orphan Annie decoder badge like the one I got for a reasonable facsimile of an Ovaltine label and a three-cent stamp, it’ll cost you anywhere from $26  to $116.  Of course three cents was worth a lot more in 1935. 

Results of family survey on the Pledge of Allegiance –

Midwesterner emails that they started Pledge and National Anthem every day after 9/11.  Says he and a few classmates would not stand for it.  Does not say why. Upstate New Yorker says she would not stand for the pledge because she was a Fabian Socialist (whatever that was).  I did not hear from any Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Teacher in an inner-city junior high (also Midwest) says one salutes the intercom, but only on alternate days during Student Resource Time, and only if the front office has remembered to broadcast the Pledge. Says there are flags in some classrooms, but although she asked for a flag three or four times, nobody ever did get around to supplying one. “I'd have brought my own in, but the only flag in the house happened to be the Union Jack.”

My own memory of the 1930s is the Pledge every morning (complete with that Hitler salute), followed by – and was this only in the Boston area? – recitation of the Lord’s Prayer (King James version) and Teacher’s reading of a Psalm.