I have few photos from my own school days or anyone else's in the collection here being predigital, we lacked ready use of cameras at school and film developing was considered for special occasions. Maybe that is all for the better, but this week's prompt recalled my obligatory high school chemistry class which I enjoyed but no photos of our experiments.  |
| Louisa Lucy Leidel Wetchen |
However following my meandering mind while I was adjusting some ancestral documentation and errors this week, I found this photo of Jerry's maternal great grandmother, Louisa "Lucy" Leidel Wetchen taken about 1888 with a brood of chicks. Lucy was a force in her own right, a straight arrow distinctive MN woman of farm and prairie who lived to be 86, and as a widow for her last 18 years. My in laws always said "Grandma Wetchen was a stickler."
This photo immediately reminded me of one of my high school plays, "Our Town" by Thornton Wilder and my role as Mrs. Gibbs and my lines, "here chick, here chick, here chick chick chick" That I recall my opening lines 51 years later, is a tribute to memorization insisted upon by Mrs. Klinke, our drama teacher. Not only that we all had to speak up and out, we had no fancy microphones nor sound systems as in today's school auditoriums. She drilled us, rehearsing up until opening night, again and again and again; until we could deliver just right, according to her ear while I thought, "what is the big deal about some woman feeding chickens?" some other lines are much more important, but not to Mrs Klinke, every line had to be projected and delivered.
As I recall I did quite well in my performances, Mrs Klinke signed my yearbook, "to Mrs. Gibbs." as you can see here. Back in that day, we all had our yearbooks signed. I wonder if they even have year books that we had, they were quite the production for us.
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| Mrs Klinke |
In 2008, on this blog, I wrote about my Our Town experience, sans photo of Lucy. Here is the link to that post. http://patonlinenewtime.blogspot.com/2008/10/our-town.html
I suppose one could draw some mystical curious coincidental connection that my 1962 high school play role would have been portrayed in real life years previously by my husband's great grandmother, someone I would never know. Strong women were not really on the radar screen back then, but I was fortunate to have many of them as teachers and my relatives too. There was one page of the yearbook with photos of that play. I have scanned it here and you can enlarge it to see us in our poised glory. I am "Patty" seated front row top photo and gazing at the bride bottom photo. Bobby Ormesher who played Doc Gibbs, my MR. wrote across that page. We were so young back then, in the times of our lives. We celebrated our 50th class reunion in September,last year, it was a good time , and Bobby was a good dance partner.
his is a Sepia Saturday post. To read others, click here to the main Sepia site. http://sepiasaturday.blogspot.com/2013/05/sepia-saturday-176-11-may-2013.html
