Happy Mother's Day

This is a day around the world when we give tribute to our mothers. Meet my mother, a school teacher and educator. This picture is from an old yearbook.

She graduated from college in 1932, the height of the Depression. Jobs were hard to come by and many people hardly got by at all, existing on handouts and soup kitchens to keep their families fed. My mother did not exist on handouts or eat in a soup kitchen, but she did live in a boarding house with roommates, most of them other teachers, who would become her lifelong best friends. She taught high school English and was in charge of the school library when she was barely older than her students.

At the beginning of WWII she married my dad and three years later gave birth to me while my father was in the South Pacific, deep in the heat of battle serving his country. My dad didn’t see me until I was eighteen months old and I had one of the worst cases of chicken pox our doctor had ever seen. I often think how hard it must have been on my mother and father to be apart and I have great sympathy and appreciation for all of our military families today.

After my sister and I started to school, she “retired” from teaching and was a stay at home mother and did not return to the classroom until we were in college. She taught seventh grade English until her retirement and ruled the Junior High School as the Head Teacher with high standards and a good heart. Her students loved and respected her because she treated each one fairly, but at the same expected that they do their homework and learn proper English grammer. I can assure you that every student that passed seventh grade English under my mother speaks with good grammar today and knows the difference between an adjective and an adverb.

Happy Mother’s Day everyone.