I was…What do you call it? A wallflower in high school. I enjoyed school but I wasn’t popular in the way that some of the girls were, you know, who dated and went to dances and so on. That wasn’t in my curriculum.

I was in the band. Sports; I love sports but in high school there wasn’t too much for girls at that time.

See, that’s an interesting thing. Today girls can play anything that the boys can play and back then…It ended with the eighth grade pretty much, if even that high.

I always rode the bus. I always rode the bus and that was fun. I liked riding the bus. We would talk and have a good time on the bus. We had to behave of course but that was a relaxing time. Not so much in the morning because you had school ahead of you, but in the afternoon.

We were all relaxed and it was over for another day! (Laughs) I had certain subjects I liked much better than others. I did like the sciences but we didn’t have much at Macomb at that time. Chemistry I think was one, and what’s the other?

Until high school we were all together for everything and then in high school we did split for a few but Macomb was still developing. It’s much more developed now and they’ve built onto the school and so forth. It was just a square. I think they were built in the 30s. I think the WPA or someone bought all the schools.

They were all very similar across the country. But they were a big improvement on what had been, you know? Well, they were brick and they were – ours was a three-story and they had a lot of room in them.
Yeah, it was an improvement, a big improvement of what had been until that point. You know, the school system didn’t really develop well until in the 40s, I think.

One-room schoolhouses are still around. There used to be one on the road east and west going to, um, let’s see, it would be north-east of here and going to the Kirby Road that leads to 69 that goes to Macomb, and there used to be one there. I don’t know it its still standing or not, but it looked well taken care of. I think they were storing grain in it.

I worked for a while here in Findlay in offices and saved my money to go on to college and I went to Capital University in Columbus, because were Lutheran and that seemed to be the easiest for me to convince my parents that yes, I should go.

For college, I attended Capital University.

I became a teacher but I started out in just a general course because I thought I’d be able to go only two years but as it turned out I was able to go the full four years. I taught in Columbus for a short time and I had dual certification at that time.

So I had German, which was easy, in a way. I had to learn High German of course. My mother spoke low and my father spoke his dialect, but I taught German and I also was certified for elementary; any elementary grade. Then I went overseas and studied there one year at the University of Goettingen in Germany.

I really enjoyed it, just to see the countryside and all that sort of thing. I had never been out of the country or traveled very much. That was a treat. I went by ship the first time, and that was another treat.

It didn’t count as graduate school, but it was like that. I should really have done what some people did. I didn’t have the brains to do it to get it to count towards that but I didn’t. So, I really have more education but I don’t know what it would count up as now. I was just glad to get the education at the time.

I graduated from high school in ’50 so it would have been in the 60s or 70s, sometime in there. I’ve forgotten the dates.

Yes, the first time I went over was with that branch and I studied at the University of Goettingen like I said. Some great scientists went there. I can’t think of their names right now. There was a statue there – oh, what I remember (Laughs), about it is, the Germans make jokes, believe it or not. A couple they had this statue of this man sitting down and a man standing talking to him and the tale that they tell is that one is saying to the other, “Well when are you going to stand up and let me sit down for a while?” They do this for all their statues. It’s funny. I never – you know, you always hear they don’t have any sense of humor, but you hear these funny stories. (Laughs)

Interviewee: Yeah, I taught in Columbus and I taught – I didn’t teach a whole lot actually. Mainly in Columbus I guess. Then I think I went overseas again…did I? Yeah. I don’t know if I had been overseas before that? I can’t remember and I didn’t keep a diary or anything. I should have really. It was just too much fun to keep going.