ALTAMONT — School is always in session during Fair Week. Kids can learn what a one-room schoolhouse was like and their elders can reminisce about the “dear old Golden Rule days.”

For a decade, Fran Hahn has overseen activities at the little red schoolhouse on the fairgrounds, taking up where Betty Spadaro left off. Earlier years, Hahn had been on duty at the schoolhouse from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. each day. This year, Brother Donald Wininski, formerly of LaSalette, will take over at 4 p.m.

Knox School 10, which served Bozenkill students from 1851 to 1955, was moved to the fairgrounds in 1967.  Spadaro began her teaching career in the 1940s. “I was 19 and the kids were almost as old as I,” she recalled back when she was superintendent in 1990. The Bozenkill schoolhouse was dedicated to her in 1997.

“It was one of the nicest schools around,” she said. “It was nicely painted with curtains in the window. And we had electricity, although there was no running water.” The water had to be carried from a trustee’s house, which was “quite a walk,” Spadaro said.

The outhouse was moved to the fairgrounds along with the schoolhouse.

Hahn said Spadaro was on the fairgrounds last week because some of her son’s antique cars will be on exhibit at the Auto Museum. Her son, Dick Spadaro, died in April after a courageous battle with a rare form of brain cancer; he was 66.

Dick Spadaro had loved “wheels” since he was a kid and, as a man, he had a business selling parts for early Fords and was known across the country and around the world for his expertise in antique car restoration.

In the single room, his mother taught children who aged from 6 to 16. “There were two or three in a class, and, in the whole school at its peak, there were 14,” she said. “I taught everything: music, art, phys. ed., whatnot — with very little to work with.”

After the schoolhouse closed, Spadaro taught at Altamont Elementary School for 33 years before retiring in 1979. She said she missed the people from her teaching days.

When a name from Knox was mentioned, she had vivid and fond recollections of all the children in that family, whom she taught on the Bozenkill a half-century before.

Last year, the Pulliam family visited the old schoolhouse during Fair Week.

“I could never forget the Pulliams,” Spadaro said. “Each one had a unique personality, yet they all believed in what was right and would say it. Joyce, she was a reader; I couldn’t get enough books up there to keep her busy...Brown, he became an engineer...I would wonder, ‘Why does he take his stamps out when he’s supposed to be doing his schoolwork?’...Well, he taught me about them and I collected stamps for years.”

Cursive highlighted

This year, Hahn has planned a cursive writing competition for the schoolhouse.

“I was born in 1930,” said Hahn, a retired nurse. “Everybody learned cursive then.”

She lamented that, in an age of keyboarding, schools no longer require students to learn cursive writing.

“I think it’s very valuable,” she said. “It’s good for hand-eye coordination. It stimulates the brain.”

A wall of the old schoolhouse features samples of cursive writing. And slates have recently been donated, so fair-goers can try their hand at writing on them with chalk — the original tablet.

Hahn will ask a schoolteacher to judge the cursive writing samples and a certificate will be presented to the best one.

Hahn’s husband, Harold, a retired engineer, has perfected his handwriting beyond cursive. “He does calligraphy,” said Mrs. Hahn. “He has good handwriting, better than mine.”

The couple, who moved frequently for his career — 12 times in the first 17 years of their marriage — “settled on Settles Hill” in 1967, she said, and have lived there happily ever since. Both are active fair volunteers; Mr. Hahn is a fair director. “We started with the fair as Grange members,” said Mrs. Hahn. “And our children were in 4-H.”

Fewer children visit the schoolhouse now since the price of fair admission now includes midway rides, said Hahn. “We used to have lots of kids coming. One year, we had over 200 drawings,” made by children who visited the schoolhouse, she said. “Now kids go to the rides very quickly. We still get preschool children, and kids from day camps,” said Hahn.

Literature lauded

Another schoolhouse priority for Hahn, besides encouraging cursive writing, is to encourage reading. She goes to garage sales all year long to buy books, and her friends donate them, too. “Last year, we gave away 100 books — children’s books, mysteries, whatever I can get,” she said.

Hahn herself is an avid reader. She has been a member of a book club at the Guilderland Public Library since her daughter was in high school. “And now she’s 50,” said Hahn.

Her club just read Mary Roach’s “Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal,” which made Hahn feel like she was back in her college Anatomy 101 class.

Now, she is reading Russell Shorto’s “The Island at the Center of the World,” which tells the story of the early Dutch settlers in Manhattan, a history she finds fascinating.

“I just love the book club,” said Hahn. “I read things I would not have read otherwise. It’s a great group of women.”

Over the years, Hahn has also enjoyed hearing the poets who read at the fair. (See related story.) She particularly likes hearing original poetry read by those who wrote it.

“It’s remarkable work,” she said. “The poems can be about anything, from knitting afghans to esoteric stuff...Sometimes, a lot of people listened.” Other times, she said, when there were no fairgoers to listen to the poets, “they just liked reading it to themselves.”