It’s school time again! The parents are happy and the kids maybe not so much so but as we all know, school is all important. I come from a family of teachers and I know how hard good teachers work to help our kids mature into knowledgable, well educated young people. After all they are our country’s future.
The first school teacher in our family was my maternal grandmother, Ida. She began teaching as soon as she graduated 8th grade and took the required teachers exam. The year was about 1897 in Little River, Kansas. After a few years her family moved to eastern Colorado where she taught for about 5 years. It was during that time that she met my grandfather and they were married Feb. 14, 1906. Although women were not allowed to teach once married, the school board at her school asked her to finish out the school year before moving to SE Kansas with her new husband. Her sister-in-law, Mathilda, was teaching in a country school in the Neutral area of SE Kansas until her marriage, I think in 1908.
The next teacher in the family was my mother, Carmel. She attended Kansas State Teacher’s College in Pittsburg and after receiving her Lifetime Teachers Certificate began teaching in a one room school, Council Corners in Cherokee, County in the fall of 1929. After a couple of years there she then moved to a two-room brick school, called Mt. Hope, west of Baxter Springs where she taught until she married my father a couple of days after school was out in April 1934. Women were still not allowed to teach when married so that ended her teaching career, she thought. With WWII that very biased law was rescinded. She was a farm wife and by that time was also raising a family so teaching wasn’t in her plan at all! However, her life was about to change, as was that of the rest of our family’s life when a local school board member knocked on our front door one nice spring day and pleaded with mom to come to their school and finish out the school year because the extremely poor teacher there was being fired and they needed an experienced teacher to help the students. They had decided mom was the teacher they needed in the most desperate of situations. Her initial answer was no, she couldn’t do that. It was the mid-50s.
Next week, the rest of the story.
