Gertrude's School Days in the early 1900's

I didn't go to school regularly until I was in the third grade.

I started school at the usual age but came home every day sick with a headache.  The odors were just too much for me.  The toilets were really just privies but were in the school basement and were very smelly.  And some of the farm children were sewn into their underwear at the beginning of winter and didn't get a bath until spring.  My stomach just couldn't take it, so Mother taught me at home for several years.  She had had more education than most of the teachers and was good at teaching, so that when I did go back to school, I had no difficulty with the classes.

Our school was the two-story square red brick building in the middle of the block bounded by Morley, Monroe, Garrison and Mason.  It had been built while my grandfather was alive and he had been one of the leaders who had pushed for it.  Until then there wasn't a high school in Dearborn.

The school was completed while my older sister Clara was in the first grade and she remembered being in a long procession of children carrying their books from the Upstairs-Downstairs School on Park to the new high school.

That was the school that everybody went to.  It had four rooms downstairs and three upstairs -- one of the upstairs rooms was double-sized.  The kindergarten, first, second, third and half of the fourth were downstairs.  And then the other half of fourth, fifth and sixth were upstairs.  When you got into the eighth grade you went into the big room that went all across the building.  That half was the seventh and eighth and all the high school.

There were no lockers -- just a board down the middle of the hall with hooks for coats.  The rooms generally had six rows of seats, three for each grade.  Most rooms held two grades.  One grade, I think the 4th, was divided.

They rang the school bell for the start of classes; if you came after the doors had been closed, you were late.  Few of the girls went out for recess; I never did.  The boys had some games they played but I don't know what they were.  The girls didn't participate.

I remember that when I was in the eighth grade there were five high school graduates that year, four girls and one boy.  One teacher and the principal were all the teaching there was for the high school youngsters then.  They taught algebra, history, English, and so on in high school but no science -- there was no lab.

Some of my classmates in the Dearborn schools were Thad Moon and Sherwood Foley, Florence Hurst --Ethel Hurst was two grades ahead of me --, two of the Sollinger boys, Clemens and Stanley, and Albert Wittelsburger who lived out on Telegraph.

Nita Clark of the Dearborn Clark family was my teacher for most of the years that I was in school all day.  She changed grades when I did.  I had a Miss Van Buren as my first teacher.  She was a pretty blond who died during the year and Nita Clark finished out the year.

Dearborn High School was not accredited and I wanted to go to college, so I changed to Detroit Central High School after the eighth grade.  I either had to do that or take an examination to get into college.  Transportation was easy: interurban to downtown, then streetcar up to a block from school.  It took not quite an hour and a half, and I used to study on the way home.  But Mother thought it was too hard to go in and out on the interurban every day, although my brother did it. 

So I lived with my Father's first cousin, Cousin Lizzie Hulbert.  I think that was one of the best things that happened in my life because I was the youngest in our family.  I didn't know anything about children at all.  They took me in and I think Cousin Lizzie did a wonderful job.  She had three little children, one was only about two when I went in and one was about four years younger than I.  They still think of me as an older sister.  They gave me training in children and that sort of thing that I wouldn't have had in my own home.  I was the baby there.

I would go into Detroit on the interurban on Monday morning and come back to Dearborn on Friday afternoon.  I did well in high school.  I even got all A's one year when my brother told me he didn't think I could do it, and I determined to show him I could.  

The only time I can remember being upset by our modest financial circumstances was when Mother had to tell me that we couldn't afford to have me attend Vassar College.  I was a senior at Central High School in Detroit at the time.  Vassar had always been my goal and my grades were good, but I just couldn't go.  The first thing I did was to drop my fourth year of Latin, which I detested.  I went to the University of Michigan as had my sister and brother.

Note:  Gertrude graduated from the University of Michigan in 1915.