BY MARIE COWLEY-ROSS
College graduation. I am excited. I will follow my childhood dream and be a teacher.
In 1929, with the Great Depression and Kansas dust storms, I wondered, where would I teach?
There was a vacancy near Wichita, Kan., at Rock Valley School. I was accepted. My contract read eight months — at $65 a month.
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Marie Cowley-Ross |
Other than four farms, this was a very depressed, oil-drilling area of ramshackle houses and transient people.
So, where would I live? One place with a family was available for $24 a month.
My attic bedroom was furnished with a bed, straw-tick mattress, table, old chest of drawers, coal oil lamp and matches.
I awoke the first night with something on my feet. It came up, up, up. I sat up and faced a big black cat. Then I found out my windows didn’t have any panes.
Morning came none too soon. But after a hearty breakfast of eggs, bacon, potatoes, biscuits and gravy, I was ready for school.
Having no car, the house-father hitched up Old Charlie to the buggy, and away we went.
The one-room school sat on a donated acre. There were two outhouses, a coal shed, a tornado cave and a pump for the well. The children ranged from ages 4 to 16, in grades one through eight, and the number of students seven to 15.
Except for the four farm families, the parents and children had few luxuries — no money for clothing, medicine or extra food. But they never complained. At school, we often cooked a big pot of beans or potato soup on the potbelly stove.
Sometimes the older boys trapped for food.
Saturday was town day. The house-father hitched the team to the two-seat buggy, you put on your best bib and tucker, and you were ready to go.
A corner grocery store was the community meeting place. It had groceries, but most of all warm, friendly people.
Back home, you might help the house-mother can food, make lye soap or even catch a pig. Now, I wasn’t really good with the pig. It ran toward me — a direct hit and I was sitting down in the mud. But only my pride got hurt.
Sunday was church day. Besides the sermon, there were other activities — an ice cream social, a taffy pull, a literary evening, and even a presentation of the play "Penrod."
Evenings were usually spent around the kitchen table doing lesson plans by the light of an Aladdin lamp. The parlor radio — if you had one — was tuned to "Amos and Andy," "Lum and Abner" or the "Lucy Show."
The two-room house with father, mother and six children didn’t have a radio — not even a newspaper or a magazine. So the children often came by, and we would play on weekends.
I was a city girl, but I soon learned the pleasures of a simple lifestyle. You could make others happy by taking part in their lives. We made snow ice cream, went sledding, walked on wooden stilts, played baseball in the pasture — all with homemade equipment.
After 59 years of teaching and ending my career as a college instructor, I still consider those first six years in Kansas as some of the most memorable in my life.
Marie Cowley-Ross taught for 39 years at Everett Junior College, retiring in 1988 at age 80. Former Herald publisher Larry Hanson was one of her students. She also taught in Edmonds and at Paine Field. She’s now 94 and is writing a book titled "Wartime Memories."
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