When Stan Proffitt was in elementary school, it was easy for his parents to let his teacher know when he and his brothers would be absent. The Proffitts lived two miles from the schoolhouse at Vale, a tiny crossroads in Fairfax County, Va. The teacher lived 2？ miles away.

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       When she walked past their house on the way to the two-room school, they would just shout out: “The boys won’t be in school today! They’ve got to work on the farm!”

       Last week, Proffitt returned to his old school. He’s 103 and is probably its last living pupil. He wanted to show it off to his great-grandchildren — 10-year-old triplets Isaac, Eric and Daphne Bjorn. They do not work on a farm. They live in Florida and were spending their spring break hitting historical hot spots in Virginia — Jamestown, Monticello, Mount Vernon — with their parents, Brig and Sarah Bjorn.

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       Their great-grandfather — they call him “G Pop” — is a bit of a historical hot spot himself, a living link to Fairfax County’s past. He was able to clear up some things about the school in Oakton, the oldest part of which dates to 1884.

       For example, he said the stove was in the middle of the classroom, not along one wall, as was previously believed.

       “That’s one thing we learned from Mr. Proffitt,” said Darlene Williamson, historian with the Friends of Vale Schoolhouse, the nonprofit that now owns the building.

       “Did you burn yourself on it?” asked Isaac, one of the triplets.

       “No,” said Proffitt. The look on his face said: Back then, kids were smart enough not to touch a hot stove.

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       “Did you cook anything on it?” asked Daphne.

       “No,” said Proffitt. “It was just for heating.”

       “Did you have field trips?” someone asked.

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       No, said Proffitt, no field trips, unless you counted the fields the pupils walked through on their way to and from school.

       It was all fields back then — corn fields and pastures, woods and dirt roads. At recess, students played fox and hounds, chasing each other until they were summoned back to class.

       “When we heard the bell, we had to run for school,” Proffitt said.

       “Did you get to ring the bell?” asked Isaac, who, like his siblings, is in fifth grade.

       “No, I don’t think I did,” said his G Pop.

       There’s a bell mounted on a table in the corner of the larger of the school’s two classrooms. It’s the original bell, lost for years, then found in a barn on the Dominy farm. Like Proffitt, Dominy is another old county family name. One of Stan’s classmates was George Waple. Waples Mill Road is named after his family.

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       “There were two johnny houses,” Proffitt said. One outhouse was for the boys and one was for the girls. On Halloween, the boys’ outhouse would wind up tipped over on its side, he said.

       “It always had a Sears and Roebuck catalogue hanging inside,” Proffitt added. “I was 21 years old before I knew what toilet paper was.”

       This necessitated explaining two things to the triplets: What the Sears and Roebuck catalogue was, and why it came in handy in an outhouse.

       “Mama ordered everything from the Sears and Roebuck catalogue,” Proffitt said.

       Not food, of course. That they grew or raised themselves on their 150-acre farm.

       “Almost everything, except carrots,” Proffitt said. “Carrots won’t grow. The ground’s too hard. You need sandy ground.”

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       The Vale school closed in 1931, and Proffitt and his brothers — by then his younger sister, too — started going to Oakton Elementary. (Only White students attended Vale. Fairfax County didn’t start desegregating its schools until 1960.)

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       For a while after high school, Proffitt worked for High’s Ice Cream. He moved to Detroit to work for the Hudson car company, then wound up building airplanes for World War II. It was his job to repair the bad rivets others had placed in sheet metal. After the war he worked for R.L. Polk, the directory company.

       Proffitt lives in Manassas. He will soon turn 104. He said that when he was at the Vale school, his favorite subject was math.

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       Daphne said her favorite subject is math, too. “We’re very alike,” she said.

       “I like math and I’m good at it,” said her brother Eric. “But I love social studies.”

       Isaac said his favorite subjects are history and geography.

       Looking around the old school — now used for social functions and community activities — Proffitt said it looked like it was in pretty good shape.

       “I guess we got a good education,” he said with a chuckle. “Most of us lived through it.”