Learning to Read with Mrs. Stanley and Francis Holbrook

When I was growing up, in Ardmore, Oklahoma, I felt rather alone in the world, as I'm sure many, perhaps most, children do. I attended a kindergarten in the home of a young Englishwoman who had come to the U.S. as a refugee from WWII, perhaps because she had married a Yank. I'm not sure. When I turned five, she told my parents that I should be in school, but at five, one could not attend public school in Oklahoma, as was probably the case in the 1950s most everywhere in the U.S.

In Ardmore, OK, however, there was a little old lady named Mrs. Stanley. Mrs. Stanley had an established first grade that a friend of my mother's, Carol Saylor, knew of and encouraged my parents to send me to along with her daughter, Sally.

Mrs. Stanley's school was in her bungalow house, classic Arts and Crafts (an architectural designation I would not know until almost twenty years later), the front living room of which had been transformed into a classroom. Mrs. Stanley sat in a rocking chair on raised wooden planks resembling a dais, with a large blackboard above her. She had a long wooden pointer that she used to address the blackboard, and we sat at wooden desks that lifted up for book and paper storage and retained their inkwells from an earlier era.

If one of the children brought Mrs. Stanley an apple, something that little kids still did in the 1950s, she would cut the apple into thin slices for the class to share. To this day, I don't like biting into an apple. I like the apple cut into thin slices.

We children were instructed in spelling bees, standing in line, calling out our answers thus:
ELEPHANT
E
E-L
E-L-E
E-L-E-P-H-A-N-T
ELEPHANT

We also learned to do addition and subtraction.

Most significant to me was the only book that our parents were required to purchase for us. It was a tiny little volume, yet one that transformed my life forever.

The book is a primer -- what a wonderfully old-fashioned word -- of Longfellow's extended poem The Song of Hiawatha.

The book is one of many developed by the educator and early feminist Florence Holbrook.

In Mrs. Stanley's bungalow I memorized:

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the Big-Sea-Water.

The illustration that accompanies these lines and the illustrations that grace the rest of the poem are exquisite. They are full-color plates and, like Longfellow's poem, romantic in their conception, realized just as Edward S. Curtis was exhibiting the first images of his prodigious photographic project. How could Longfellow's rhythmic, idealized fiction not capture the imagination of a five-year-old.

Florence Holbrook, educator and feminist, was also a peace activist. A member of the Chicago Political Equality League and the Chicago Peace Society, she attended The Hague Peace Conference in July 1915 as a delegate to the Women's Congress for Peace and Freedom. She is pictured here, #10. The earliest reference I have found for the peace initiative is to the publication The Advocate for Peace in 1913.

After the tutelage of the seminal figures of Mrs. Stanley and Florence Holbrook combined, I went to public school for second grade -- and shut down. There I was supposed to read "Run, Tip, run." (My Dick and Jane had Tip, not Spot.) The quick fix of the day was the deadening film strip. (Do readers of a certain age remember these?) How could this compete with the exoticism of Hiawatha? My second grade report cards descended to D's.

My parents always insisted that having sent me to Mrs. Stanley's was the greatest mistake they ever made. I have always contended that it was the most blessed turn of events that could ever have befallen me.

Other books created by Florence Holbrook:
The Book of Nature Myths
Cave, Mound and Lake Dwellers (and Other Primitive People)
Dramatic Reader for Lower Grades
Elementary Geography
Every-Day Speller
From Many Lands: A Third Reader
Northland Heroes
Poetry for Schools
'Round the Year in Myth and Song
Why the Crocodile Has a Wide Mouth and Other Nature Myths