After graduating from high school, the motivation for Olive Fordham to begin her college career is one that many of us can relate to - her dad told her she’d better get a job.
“‘You can’t just stay at home and do nothing,’” Olive recalls her father, Tom Fordham, telling her.
“I said, ‘No, that’s true.’”
It was then that her father suggested Oceana County Normal School, and Olive was presented with her calling as an educator, thinking to herself: “Oh, hell, I don’t want to be a teacher of all things.”
Olive then asked the obvious question, “‘Well? Who else is there?’” And after a presentation of a list of local girls already enrolled, Olive relented.
Father and daughter traveled to Hart to meet with the sole teacher and administrator of County Normal at the time, a woman named Miss Pearl, or Pearl Berger. Though the school year had already started, Miss Pearl found she could make room for one more girl.
That took care of enrollment, but now Olive needed a place to stay. That was a necessity for many of the girls attending County Normal, and Olive was lucky that there was also one more space available boarding with Angela Landon.
Landon was an “old maid” who used to work for Hart Schools - Olive believes she was a superintendent - and she was already there to help the girls. Olive couldn’t remember the exact cost of her lodging, but she recalled that it was “nominal.”
What Olive clearly remembered, however, was her bedmate, a girl she grew up with named Ruth. And if it is any indication by how Olive uttered the girl’s full government name (which I will not provide out of respect for airing old grievances with someone's great-grandmother), she disliked sharing a room and a bed with Ruth.
I’d like to take a moment to share a little bit about Miss Pearl. While she may not be as long-lived as Olive, passing away in 1988 at the age of 85, Pearl’s life was no less thrilling. Her obituary explains that she taught for 41 years, retiring in 1968, with a bachelor’s degree from Western Michigan and a master’s from the University of Michigan. In those 41 years, Pearl taught all over the world, from a year in England to serving as a director of education in the capital city of Caracas, Venezuela. She traveled the world recreationally as well, visiting Europe, South and Central America and the Caribbean. Her estate sale, understandably, made the local news.
Miss Pearl did everything at County Normal, as Olive explained. “She was the teacher, superintendent, everything. She ruled the roost.”
Pearl was in charge of enrolling, evaluating and testing the students, as well as teaching every class. Some of the classes involved methods of teaching - reading, writing and arithmetic, as they say - as well as various activities to do with children to keep them engaged and occupied.
“She was fair,” Olive remembers. “She taught you like a teacher would; she tried to be like a county teacher to the students like they would be to their children. She really was quite smart.”
There was no dedicated instruction to classroom management, but Pearl shared with her students her wisdom from years of teaching across the local rural schools and across continents. “This is what you will run into, and this is what you will do,” as Olive said.
In Olive’s time there was no single classroom for County Normal students to practice teaching; rather, they traveled all over the county on a schedule, experiencing different students at different rural schools on different days of the week. This wasn’t the only way that County Normal students integrated with the community, as there were plenty of social gatherings organized for and by the student teachers.
As Olive explained, “A social was a good thing… Every fall, to introduce the teacher and the kids to the community, they put on what they called a box social.”
These socials were free, with funds raised through an auction on boxed lunches. Olive recalls them consisting of a couple sandwiches, a cookie or piece of cake, but the main draw was a banana - “always a banana” - which many of the participants had never had the opportunity to try before.
The auctioneer at her Flower Creek School was typically Everett Seaver, known throughout Claybanks for his skills. Olive recalls him holding up the boxes, noting the tasty treats and praising the cook who prepared the box. Everett would start at 50 cents and go up to a dollar, maybe more “if he could wiggle it out of them.”
Many of these boxes were put together by local mothers or female students, and, if bananas were available, that was the other draw for certain boxes. Many auction participants would bid repeatedly on a boxed lunch they knew was prepared by a housewife renowned for her cooking skills. Other times, young men would bid on the lunches prepared by girls they wanted to date. It would give the boys a chance to eat with the girl and, if he was really brave, escort her home. Joanne Kessler noted that her Aunt Phyllis and Uncle Doug got together at a box social at the Green School.
The money raised from these box socials went on to buy books for the students and libraries for the rural schools (in fact, many of the rural schools hosted box socials themselves). Some of the most coveted books, Olive recalls, were titles like "Tom Sawyer" or "Little Women." Olive recalls her old one-room schoolhouse of Flower Creek and how “we had some really good books… it wasn’t luxurious, but we did have a library.”
Olive graduated from County Normal in 1943, and she received her diploma that spring. There was a modest ceremony, and Olive recalls Miss Pearl enlisting her to write the graduates' names on their diplomas because of her wonderful penmanship.
“We managed to get through,” Olive concluded.
They didn’t realize they were the final graduating class from County Normal. More on that next week.
