I was raised up in a Mennonite home. My parents were Mennonites and my grandmothers wore little white caps and black clothes. They were married in black silk clothes with a little bonnet and so forth. My parents were Swiss, German-Swiss Swiss, and I started to school and I didn’t speak English. I started school and I went to a country school two years and then I moved to Bluffton and by bus we went to school in Bluffton.


Ah, it was a school, the Diller School that was out in the country about a mile and a half from where I lived and we would walk to school. I can remember having really, really rough snows and my dad, I can remember, he had us on the sled. They used to go to the woods to get wood for the furnace and everything and he would let the kids ride. We’d be at the end of the line and the kids would ride and we’d go to school. There was a one-room schoolhouse and that was an interesting time. I thought it was big stuff when I was allowed to go to school in Bluffton. They closed the country schools.


I’m Grateful to Mrs. Mabel Lance, Who Introduced Me to the World of Art

I remember my sister and me singing a duet when we were in the country school. At Christmas time you’d have to come up with something for Christmas program and so forth, and I remember we sang a duet. It was kind of funny. She played the piano or the organ. There was one other girl in the same grade as I in that and I can’t tell you how many there were. I want to say 18 to 25 students there, probably.

So, when I went to Bluffton to school it was like a new world that opened up for me and I remember we had a woman, her name was Mrs. Mabel Lance and she introduced us to art and that was my first thinking about that. My father was good at drawing and things like that. He did some neat pen work and so forth, but just for fun. So, I kind of admired her and my first experience with her was she arranged a trip to the Toledo Museum. I didn’t even know a museum existed at that point.

Well, I want to say maybe fourth grade, maybe fifth grade, and that was a big thrill because it introduced me to what the museum was and what wonderful paintings there were and so on. So, my interest stayed with me all the way through school, however, it was a secondary thing. It was something you did twice a week. But, it helped from a basis perspective and so on.

I graduated from Bluffton High School. My father passed away when I was 16 and that house on the farm where I was born was a double house. They had built a wing onto it for their grandparents and then when they passed away my two maiden aunts lived there.

Eventually they went and became caregivers for a man from our church whose wife passed away when the baby was born. They raised that child, helped to raise that child, so the house was emptier. Then at the time my father passed away, then we divided the house in two and we lived on one side and the renters lived on the other side that took care of the farm. So, that went on for several years.