Okay, but going back to this one, we moved there and I went to Saint Rose Catholic School and it was about a five block walk and we walked home every day for lunch. We wore uniforms. It was a white blouse and navy blue skirt and…

I went to the Sisters of Charity school. I have a picture of it someplace. It was a two-story and had built a long time, and beside it is still Saint Rose’s church. My great-grandfather helped put the cross on that steeple – which I have to put in there.

I went in there and I didn’t like school too well. When I got to the third grade I hated it because she was a really mean teacher. I ended up in the cloakroom!

Then I got to the sixth grade and I went to the little library and this lady introduced me to these books, “You might like them.”

Before then, I didn’t like to read, and my eyes aren’t very good anyhow so that might be some of it. The books were by Joseph Sheller and it was a series about the Civil War and two cousins and each one falls on a different side. I was hooked. That hooked me to reading. It put a character going through history and then you could see it better. From then on I read.

Then by the time I got to the ninth grade they made me quit reading because my eyes had gone from one level, to normal, to the other level. That’s when I became a little more social because I was a bookworm until then. In fact, Barb and I would go up to the main library and get books in the summertime and come home and sit on the swing and just read books.

We had no playground equipment of course – and there were cliques even then and so Barb and I and the other Barbara Pew, but she’s Wilcox now, we played together and some of the other kids, they didn’t purposely ignore us we just felt it.

Of course, I was a good student because – they called me sometimes “The Brain”. That and “Baby Ruth” because I cried a lot (Laughter). I still do!

So, then when I got in high school they said, “You couldn’t do any homework by artificial light” so I had to cancel my cooking class and sewing class and have study periods and do my homework then. So, I had to learn to talk to other people.

That’s one thing I did learn, a long time ago I would walk like two steps behind. But in the sixth grade the other girls would wait after school even if I was cleaning erasers to chase me home and beat me up. But my dad taught me how to box, and I boxed one kid’s ears and I never got bothered after that.

When my dad taught me to box, he said: “I am not rescuing you from this grocery store anymore!” and he took me down in the basement and built a boxing ring. He had boxed when he was young – and taught me to do that.

So, once I took care of Buddy Andrews that was it. He was a boy next door, but I didn’t really use all the moves because my mom’s friend, it was in front of her house, called and said, “You’re daughter is out here sitting cross legged over Buddy taking his ears and shaking his ears up and down!” (Laughter) Well, he was bullying me and I got him!

My Mother Was An Early Standout Among Women Athletes

Both our parents were athletic. Mom and dad were both on track in a time when women hardly ran track.
Oh, my dad has medals and my mom has medals. Mom has the one medal she’s so proud of and she tied the woman’s world record for the 50-yard dash in 1922. She got all first places except one second place because her stocking had fallen down and you didn’t dare show skin. They had the bloomers to here and the stockings to here, so she took a second to pull the stocking up and it cost her second place.

Mom told me a story that she and dad both sang in the Faurot Opera House. The train went through town and the people going to Chicago to perform would stop one night in Lima and do one performance.
Mom tells me this story; it’s gone now where it was, but they were singing in the chorus and a horse was to go across the stage. They were singing, “All Hail to Mordicai!” That’s it! (Laughter) My mom says, “We were really good!” and the horse went along going boop, boop, boop across the stage. Afterwards my mom said they all got out in the alley and they just died laughing, but they never cracked a smile there on stage.

So, that was one of my mom’s things she told me about.

My dad boxed some and he played ball. This was, again, after school. He won medals mostly for running, those medals were, but he’s got pictures of himself on these teams and one of them I think….see I’d have to look at them to remember. But, there was a field house here in Lima too that sometimes great leagues would stop in. He went to those. Okay, and where was I?


High School

Okay, by this time I moved to Saint Gerard’s and that’s where I became social. Saint Gerard’s High School. It was a high school then, and the people there were so different. I mean, I was a new kid and they just opened their arms and took me in and it was wonderful. I loved it.

We had 20 girls and 7 boys in the class. We had the upstairs. The church was the downstairs. In the upstairs, and one end was the grade school and one end was the high school. That statue in there that you see as you take a look around the corner was in my senior class when I was in there.

But, we had Ursuline nuns teaching us then and…I’m a terrible speller. In fact, I was so bad in high school when we took shorthand I really became bad because you wrote shorthand as it sounds. So then the nun took me aside on one of my study periods and got me to do better at English and spelling, but I still look everything up in the dictionary if I am not sure.

Well, we didn’t have any girls’ athletics. You should have seen the gym class at Saint Rose! Oh gosh! It was crazy and we had no showers of course, and there was no gym class at Saint Gerard’s because there was no gym.

Our boys had to go to Saint Rose to have any kind of a sport. I walked a mile home that time because my house was actually up there on Elizabeth on the same block as Saint Rose.

So anyhow, it was really wonderful. I was smart but nobody made fun of me for being smart. We had four dances a year. They were just canned music. One was the fall dance, Christmas dance, Valentine’s and then a spring dance. We had class plays too.

When they were dancing though you had to have a ruler’s length between you and the fellow. You danced properly and you had a ruler’s length in there! When we went to prom we had to go and be inspected by the nuns before we went to prom. I had two formals. I can’t remember the first one but the second one was strapless so we made little capes. Our mothers made all little capes and we’d go for our inspection and then when we got there the capes were gone! (Laughter) I’ll show you what this would look like.