I was born March 16, 1893, the eldest of three children, Clement Robert and Kent Frederic were my brothers. As a sixth grader, I remember Mabel Switzer, later Mabel Hamilton, teaching in the Avon grade school. Her room was just across the hall from mine. I little thought she would be my relative by marriage from 1921 until past the time this is written. At 8, I started organ music lessons on an old organ, but after studying with Mrs. Dr. Pearson for five years, I was advanced enough that I required a larger keyboard for more difficult music, so father purchased a Wing piano from New York City.
It was a beautiful instrument of curly circassian walnut case with five-foot pedals. One produced guitar music while playing the piano keys, and another gave mandolin music. The others were the ordinary soft pedals and a sustaining pedal. I practiced on this instrument for three more years and was ready for the pipe organ, when, my high school days were so filled with studying during the school years and I began to learn how to be a housekeeper during the summers that my music stopped.
I played some for Sunday school and church in Avon, then in Airdrie, later. Our neighbors in this village, Mrs. McIvor and Miss McNeill, prevailed on me playing the treble part in piano duets with each of them in several concerts through the years. When we left the family home, the retirement home was too small to have room for the large piano, so it was sold for $250, $13 more than its purchase price 54 years before, when it was new. The Calgary lady who bought it was quite thrilled with the beautiful case and the extraordinary performance of the piano. A few weeks after getting it, she told us she had played it so long the first evening she could hardly work the typewriter the next morning at her work.
Five girls and two boys were in my Avon high school graduating class in 1911. While there I had competed in a declamatory contest and had won third with “The One Hundred and Oneth.” Afterwards I gave it a Knox College to win second and again at Macomb Normal, where I won first against nine others. I was awarded a $50 bursary by Knox College at Galesburg, Ill., to help defray my expenses, so I enrolled there and attended for a year before deciding to become a teacher so entered the Macomb Normal school in the fall term of 1912 and graduated at the end of the 1913 summer term.
School days started again in five weeks as I started my teaching career in Viola, Ill., for $55 per month. The following 2 years I taught at Stephen, Min., then since my family had moved to Alberta, I taught at the foot of Lake McDonald, Glacier Nat’l Park, Apgar, Mont., for a year, then a year at Sandpoint, Ida., before going to Rock Island, Ill., to teach Geography in the Franklin Departmental school for one and one half years.
Our children have made a shrine of the little red one roomed school in which I taught at Apgar. It is now being used as a drug store and beauty parlor, but several have looked it up and are happy with the knowledge their mother occupied it for nine months as a teacher when it was a school, in fact our Romaine McLelland, second daughter, contacted Eddie Brewster, who claimed he went to school to a brown-eyed, brown haired little young woman, a Grace Merrill. He claimed his recollection of her was quite vivid, although I believe he was just starting to school and went for just a month until his parents moved away.