In 1917, Emma Hamsher, a thoroughly modern, Progressive teacher, taught high school Latin, algebra, geometry, English, history, girls’ athletics, drama, dancing, and directed Industrial Arts at the New Mexico Institute for the Blind. The school’s classrooms were light and airy and class sizes were small - six or seven students. For the first few days as the children arrived at school, she visited them when they were being put to bed, starting to get to know them. She went to bed feeling depressed and wondering if she was capable of teaching these children.
Emma found her students delightful, cooperative and willing to learn, with one exception - - the school's greatest athlete, a Navajo boy totally blind from smallpox. Yiacero had never been taught by anyone but a male, and every time she asked him a question, he said, in a staccato voice, “ I don't know.” She was sure he did know.
She tried all the teaching tools she had learned in college; she knew she needed to be a role model, not a critic, but one day she had heard the last “I don’t know,” she ever wanted to hear! She stopped being a role model, walked down the aisle to the young man, slammed a huge Braille book on his desk, and shouted, “I know you are a big strong man and I'm just a young woman, but so help me, if I get another ‘I don't know’ from you, I shall bash you over the head with this book!”
There was absolute silence. Yiacero's shoulders began to bounce and he laughed and the laugh became so infectious that she laughed too, and the rest of the students followed suit. He began to help the struggling teacher who was younger than he; he taught her Braille and they became good friends.
8th grade graduates - Louise Jones, Yiacerro Gastea, Glen Stemple, Lila Warnock
Emma wrote that she loved teaching these children and that she was learning more from them than they were learning from her. Alamogordo had very little to offer in the way of entertainment, so any time she wasn’t teaching or exploring the desert or mountains and canyons, she was with the children.
One day, she took a group of her students for a walk. Louise, totally blind from birth with sockets rather than eyes, was walking at her side holding her arm. They came to a deserted ranch with a dilapidated corral and she pointed toward a lone post. She asked, “What is over there?” They stepped over to the post, she felt it, and Emma asked how she knew it was there.
“I could tell by the change in the breeze as we walked past it,” she explained.
Emma began to learn how her blind students understood the world and their heightened sense of hearing to navigate their environment. They taught their teacher how they used sounds to determine the location of objects or position or movement of people, how they could feel the presence of obstacles in the terrain by echo location, how touch plays a role in recognizing the features of people and objects, and how smell can help the blind navigate and orient themselves. A new tool, the white cane, was beginning to be promoted and distributed by The Lions Clubs International as its signature program. The cane used tapping to locate obstacles and sounds for reverberation to hear where objects were nearby.
Emma and the children created games using sensory testing. The students had fun interacting with each other and competing for the number of identifications they could make with sounds, smells, taste, and touch. They insisted their teacher close her eyes and participate, too. Emma thought their descriptions as to shape, size, texture, pretty/ugly, sweet/sour, and loud/quiet were poetic. She combined the lessons with discovery and writing and determined that their sensory perceptions were much sharper and their descriptive writing skills much improved.
Emma quickly learned about the perils of frontier life in the West. While perusing through Braille books in the basement, she tipped over an open box which revealed a rattlesnake. She left the snake to the handyman to “handle;” he later showed her the six foot long skin.
One afternoon during a gym class outdoors, while giving commands standing on a mound, she yelled, “Class dismissed,” and began running to the showers while doing a strip tease at the same time. She had been standing on an ant hill and was covered and beginning to get bitten.
She liked to ride up into the Sacramento Mountains, take a little picnic and read. On her way home one afternoon, she came to a small mountain stream and stopped to water her horse. There was a shady nook up the stream a bit where she could drop the reins for her horse to graze, and she took her book and sandwich out of her saddlebag. After she had settled in, a man came dashing through the woods, down the bank to the stream; he washed his hands and arms while looking behind himself and was unaware of her. He crossed the stream, ran up the bank diagonally to the left, and on through the woods.
Shortly after, a posse rode to the stream, saw Emma and her horse and asked if she had seen a man come by that way. She said he had stopped at the stream to wash off and then ran. They told her the runaway had killed a man with a knife in a lumber camp and was probably washing blood from his hands and arms. She pointed her finger and said the stereotypical line, “He went that-a-way!” The posse rode off and Emma left in the opposite direction.
Many Easterners crossed the Mississippi after the golden age of the Wild West with the impression from reading dime novels that cowboys were hard, tough, mean scoundrels. Emma described the cowboys that she met as ‘perfect gentlemen.’ She found them to be kind, helpful and knowledgeable, and having wonderful senses of humor.
Her first encounter with a cowboy happened on the way from town to school one day. She was following a path that was thick and tall with overgrown weeds. She passed a wrangler going in the opposite direction and he commanded her to stop. She didn't, so he bellowed, “Miss, I said stop!” She stopped out of fear; he rode over and removed a tarantula as big as a fist from her skirt. She had never seen a tarantula before and couldn’t stop thanking him. He just nodded, touched the brim of his hat and sauntered off.
There was an ongoing war between the ranchers and coyotes whose ghostly howls at night warned of their frequent marauding, doing harm to the livestock and picking off wobbly newborn calves. One weapon the cowboys used against the coyotes was putting out poisoned food. A problem with this approach was that other creatures might find the same food.
The school had a dog, a collie named Lassie, who roamed the campus and whom the students adored. She had a litter and one was a beautiful albino pup that was snow white. Emma was given the pick of the litter and she chose the albino and named him Prince. She wrote her family and fiance that Prince was completely different from any dog she had ever had; he was smarter and had a great sense of humor.
Emma would sit on the grass and Prince would creep up behind her, and very precisely with his teeth, remove her hair pins one by one. These were the days of very long hair with lots of pins to hold it above the nape. When Prince had enough pins out and her hair came tumbling down, he was delighted and danced around and made sounds like he was trying to tell her something. Apparently, he liked her better with her hair down than with it up.
When Emma was not on the school campus, Prince was outdoors and spent most of his time at the campus gate to greet visitors and await her arrival. One day when she returned, he was not there and she went to the office where Mr. Pratt gave her the bad news that Prince had gotten into some meat meant for the coyotes. He was in such agony that he had to be put to sleep. Emma was stunned with the loss of her best friend and it would bring tears to her eyes for the rest of her life whenever she reminisced about her snow white dog.
Many of the students who were boarding at the school were from homes scattered across the large State of New Mexico - you could fit all of Great Britain in the Land of Enchantment and still have room for a couple of Rhode Islands. Consequently, many of the students were unable to get home for Christmas. Some were invited to spend the holiday with friends whose homes were nearby, but most of the children remained at school.
The teachers who had the same geographic problems stayed on the campus and did all they could to keep the children happy. Some of the students had never experienced a Christmas tree nor heard of Santa Claus and the presents he slid down the chimney. They trimmed a tree, sang Christmas songs, and wrote letters to St. Nick. Emma took the letters and bought presents for the children at the stores in Alamogordo. Many businesses, churches, and citizens helped her financially and the young teacher was amazed with the community’s generosity.
On Christmas morning after breakfast, and after the children had opened their presents with many oooohs and aaaahhhhs, everyone was off to church. They returned to the campus where a turkey with stuffing and all the trimmings were waiting. The tables were festively decorated and at each place was a little trinket. The children were excited about everything. After the meal, they were free to do as they pleased.
Emma was asked to give a reading to an organization in Alamogordo that was staging a charity function. She gave a motivational reading and as an encore, she read Eugene Fields “Jest Fore Christmas” about a little boy who only starts behaving right before Christmas. She wasn't aware that a group of cowboys was lined up at the rear of the hall until she heard them chuckling as she read, “any cocky little boy might brag that Buffalo Bill and cowboys is good enough for me.” She made a hasty exit through the rear door to avoid their ribbing.
After the holidays, Pedro Suarez from Mexico City came to Alamogordo to establish a Protestant church, but he couldn’t speak but a few words of English. Someone in town sent him to Mr. Pratt as his was the only school around that might teach English as a language. Emma told Pastor Suarez that she was willing to teach him English if he would teach her Spanish.
This went on for two years. Suarez's Spanish was Castilian, and Emma learned from her student the differences of Spanish in the northern part of the state which was different somewhat from the southern part. Students would argue about which words were the proper name for something. At birthday celebrations, northern New Mexicans would ask for “quéqué” and southern Spanish speakers would request “pastel.” Emma learned her Spanish and Spanglish quite well and was able to communicate with her Spanish-speaking students and their parents; this would be extremely helpful when she started her child-find work later on.
Spring was just around the corner and the school was planning for summer vacation. World War I was full on. Emma was homesick and took a job teaching swimming lessons at Wilson College near her parents. Her fiancé was training with his tank unit in upstate New York and she was unable to visit him.
When Emma received her new contract from Mr. Pratt, she learned that the school board had doubled her teaching salary for the coming year. She discovered she missed the school and was chomping at the bit to get back to New Mexico. Emma wasn’t quite sure if the reason her salary doubled was for what she had accomplished or for her greenhorn notoriety and entertainment and gossip she provided for the Alamogordo community.
In the fall, Emma was eager to be at school when Mr Pratt arrived with the children. She traveled the three days from Pennsylvania in Pullman cars which were very elegant at the time. The porters were friendly and gave magnificent service. They pressed your jackets, polished your shoes, answered every beck and call, the cars were clean and comfortable, and the food was delicious. The Pullman porters, maids, and cooks were well respected in their communities and some would later become leaders in the Civil Rights Movement.
It was extremely difficult to reach the homes of many of the students and particularly impossible for parents to make the trip to school having to leave jobs and families behind. Consequently, the school took the responsibility for rounding up the students. Well before the opening of school, parents of those living in the far away areas were notified as to the opening day, the station on the main line at which the children would be picked up, and the time schedule for the trains arriving and leaving. Rarely ever was a parent negligent in getting their child to the train station.
Mr. Pratt would start at the extreme northern part of the state and then work his way south by local trains. He would pick up the children at the scheduled stations, arrive at El Paso, then change trains and travel the ninety miles to Alamogordo and deliver the gaggle of children to the campus. When the school year was over, the procedure was reversed; parents were notified to be at the station to meet each child as they were dropped off.
The children were glad to be among their friends again but a few were a bit homesick. Emma was happy to have her students back and anxious to teach. She had much more confidence in herself than the year before. She had researched progressive education trends and had written lesson plans during the summer to broaden her curriculum. Her goal was to make drama, physical work, and Industrial Arts more sophisticated and follow what schools in the East were doing.
John Dewey was the Father of Progressive Education. Former President Teddy Roosevelt had been an apt accomplice in the Progressive Movement - demanding fairness in all concerns of government regulation and deregulation. Education to this point had been mostly for those who could afford it. Nineteenth Century learning was a rigid process; teachers were supposed to fill students with knowledge through lecture and retain information through rote memorization. The 3 R’s were the curriculum. Punishment was doled out generously.
The new, progressive ideas of Dewey appealed to Emma. She believed students learned best through active engagement, "learning by doing" and hands-on experiences; these included learning through projects, field trips, and other real-world learning opportunities. She wanted to nurture the emotional, artistic, and creative aspects of her students along with academic knowledge. Developing students' critical thinking and problem-solving skills, encouraging them to question, explore ideas, and construct their own understanding was her goal. Her ideas did not always bode well with those with more old-fashioned principles.
The staff and faculty were the same when Emma returned for her second year of teaching. There was one new person who was known as Matron. She was responsible for the upkeep of the dormitories and the welfare and discipline of the girls. Several weeks after she had been there, Matron asked Emma to come to her room. A student named Manuelita was sitting on a chair. She had been mischievous, daring, and a bit disobedient. The staff at the school doled out discipline “in loco parentis,” a Latin phrase meaning "in the place of a parent.”
Matron explained that Manuelita had been troublesome, disrespectful and should be spanked and Emma should do it. Emma had never hit anyone, much less a young adult, and as she stood there with her mouth hanging open, Manuelita took over. She said, “Come on and get it over with.”
Manuelita handed her an antique hairbrush, bent over the bed, her feet squared on the floor, and her derriere very much in evidence. With one light SWAT the brush broke into pieces. The girl, a few years younger than Emma, rolled on the bed, covering her head with her arms, and Emma could see her shoulders shaking. She grabbed Manuelita’s arm and scurried her to her room, where they both covered their mouths trying to stifle laughs.
Emma felt guilty about finding the situation humorous, and the two talked about respecting Matron because she was so elderly, probably in her 50’s, and had to work at such a difficult job where she was responsible for so many children. They decided together that Manuelita would try to help Matron or at least be respectful to the haggard woman.
Another time, Matron sent a message to Emma that she was having trouble getting Petrita to bed. Petrita was Emma’s favorite student; she was beautiful, smart, strong willed and well spoken - but she had a raging temper. She was lying on the floor and would kick and scream if anyone came near her. She was keeping the other children awake and it was impossible to get her to listen. There was a bathtub nearby and Emma ran cold water in it. When it was half full, she rushed Petrita, picked her up, and dumped her in the tub. It stopped the screaming but the girl would not talk to her.
After a few days, Emma received a knock on the door and Petrita’s head stuck through the opening. “Are you mad at me?” Petrita whispered. She assured the young girl that she was not mad. “Who is with you,” Emma asked, suspicious that Matron had put her up to apologizing. “No one but God,” she replied. Emma stood up and went to the door to give her prize student a hug and all was well between them after that.
Emma’s last experience with solving discipline problems involved a new faculty member - after this incident, Emma declared she was on strike from being the behavior problem solver. This teacher was a magnificent musician and a good teacher, but was also very dramatic. One Saturday morning she went to the superintendent's office dressed in a negligee. Mr. Pratt informed her that she was not properly dressed to be in his office. She ran to her room shrieking hysterically and she began wailing so loudly it could be heard all over the campus.
Emma was called into Mr. Pratt’s office. He asked if she could do something to calm this woman down. Emma asked what she should do? She couldn’t pick the full grown woman up and put her in a cold bath. Mr Pratt said that maybe a slap on the face would set her back to normal. Emma said, “I can't do that.” Mr. Pratt assured her that she would figure out a solution.
Emma climbed the stairs slowly hoping the teacher would be worn out by the time she got to her room. The door was slightly ajar; Emma pushed it open and encountered the woman who was like a caged animal striding from wall to wall and howling a diatribe of complaints. The woman started toward Emma and when she got near enough, Emma landed the palm of her hand on her cheek. She stopped screaming immediately and they stared at each other for a few seconds. She kissed Emma on her cheek and said, “Thank you. That’s just what I needed!”
Emma gave notice that she refused to do anyone else’s dirty work because she felt she compromised her character by swatting and dunking and slapping other people. They did not call on her again to solve their problems.
Emma felt she had accomplished a great many things during her second year as a teacher. In Industrial Arts they knitted caps and scarfs for the Army in Europe and each child knitted at least one personal item. They turned pottery and wove basketry. The school had a wonderful orchestra program under the direction of Mrs Pratt, the Superintendent’s wife. Emma taught ballroom dancing and the orchestra would play for a party about once a month. The students danced as though they were pros; there were refreshments and everyone enjoyed the activity, even the staff.
In the evenings after study hall, the older children liked to play cards, Hearts and simple games with the Braille markings on the cards. Emma was a bridge buff and taught some of the older students the game. Their concentration was magnificent and they remembered who played what cards better than Emma did.
They also played pinochle and simpler card games with the younger kids plus checkers and dominoes. Dramatic skits were given during the year and Emma taught folk and interpretive dance classes for performances. The high school classes read literature and analyzed what they had read.
Several Latin students were a shining light; Spanish speakers learned the root of their language quickly and easily. Her students became interested in geology, so on Saturdays and holidays, Emma took them on picnics to the canyons where they hunted for rocks. shards, arrowheads, and gold! The gold they discovered turned out to be pyrite, fools gold, but the prospects of discovering it were exciting.
The students learned geology by touch and feel; the density, weight, texture, strata, and compositions of the rocks revealed their origins. They visited a prairie dog town and learned about "wards" and "coteries” - family groups that recognize each other by sniffing or kissing. They discovered that the prairie dogs groom each other, build burrows, play, work together to raise their young, and fight to defend their territory.
They acquired the names of the desert plants on their field trips - some of the flora was not conducive to learning about by touch; they chased tumbleweeds and picnicked on blankets on the ground. The most exciting day trip was to the White Sands. Riding in the back of a wagon drawn by two strong horses to the snow white sand to roll down dunes, chase each other on tops of ridges, dig a hole to bury a friend up to the neck, and fill ears, noses, hair, and every bodily nook with fine granules was as good as it could get!
The school term ended; Emma’s Spanish teacher went back to Mexico and the children were ready to return home for the summer. Mr. Pratt said he would not be taking the children to their parents, Miss Hamsher would escort them. Emma had 40 children to deliver via the railroad. All 41 of them were put on the train at Alamogordo headed to El Paso. She was worried about changing trains in El Paso. She briefed the children on their behavior and who was responsible for whom. She need not have worried; the children were responsible and reliable and three Red Caps efficiently assisted her and her 40 students making the train change. Not one of the Pullman baggage and children handlers would accept a tip - they claimed they were happy to help.
Pullman Red Cap Baggage Handler Pullman Porter and Passenger
Several hours passed and the children were excited to be going home; they were playing games and reading Braille books they brought to wile away the time. Children were dropped off at their villages, ranches and farms along the way. The train came to a stop and Emma looked out the window for a station but there was no station.
They were told that there would be quite a delay because a large section of the track had been washed away by heavy rainstorms. Hungry children sat for several hours with nothing to eat and a diminishing amount of water. Emma knew the parents were anxious and worried waiting for them. The washout was on a curve and Emma stood on the steps of a car and caught sight of a hand car just around the curve.
She learned that the next little town was only three miles away and had a small station with a lunch counter. She told the engineer that if she could get across the washout to the hand car, she could come back with food and water. Emma explained the plans to the children and left the older boys and girls and the agreeable conductor in charge of the little ones.
Two men wearing high water waders carried her across the mud to the hand car. One of the men climbed up with her and they got to the station in a very short time. The attorney for the Santa Fe railroad was at the lunch counter and when she told him her story, the hand cart was loaded with baskets of food and two big cans, one full of milk and the other with water. When she arrived back at the train, she was carried by one of the men to the train first, followed by the food. This movable feast was enjoyed more and talked about longer than any other meal she shared with the student.
The children were becoming sleepy from the long wait before they were on their way again. Emma felt bad for the poor, tired and worried parents but the station master had informed them all along the way that their children were safe and why there was such a delay.
Her last student was picked up by his parents in Santa Fe, and Emma made it just in time to take the midnight train back to El Paso. She was asleep when her head hit the pillow in her cozy berth. The porter woke her in El Paso.
When she returned to the school, Mr. Pratt decided that in addition to being a teacher, she was to serve as the field secretary, locating blind children whose parents were unaware of the New Mexico Institute for the Blind. Emma left for summer vacation; her new contract had her returning two weeks before school opened to begin her new duty finding children and increasing the campus’s enrollment. She reluctantly left New Mexico for the East; she couldn’t wait to begin her new job.
To be continued…
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