Emma Hamsher, Thoroughly Modern Twentieth Century Teacher - Part IV

    

New Mexico Institute for the Blind Campus

 The 1919 school year at the New Mexico Institute for the Blind began without a hitch.  Emma met her students and their parents at their designated train stations and they easily transferred trains in El Paso to Alamogordo with the help of the Pullman Red Caps who were friends of Emma’s by now.  For the first few weeks, it seemed they were all settling down to a wonderfully productive year. Then suddenly children started becoming ill; everyone feared another flu epidemic.  It wasn’t flu, it was worse -- smallpox! 

    The school was put in quarantine. Fortunately,  a new health center had been built on campus during the summer and a nurse from El Paso had been hired. She was well-versed in nursing smallpox - there was little to do but comfort the children who were sick, try to keep their fevers down, and clean up the bodily messes from diarrhea and throwing up.  

    Small children and Natives were especially vulnerable to this virus.  Thirty percent of its victims would die, be blinded, or have short term syndromes, horrible facial and bodily scarring, or lifelong illnesses from the disease.  In the Native population, the mortality rate was much higher; the European disease had killed 90% of the first Americans within the first hundred years Anglo settlers set foot on Eastern shores.

    Few of the children had been vaccinated; the nurse lined students and unvaccinated staff up to be given the vaccine. If the injection site didn’t form a blister within the first two weeks, they would be re-vaccinated.  The dime size scar on a person’s arms was their proof of vaccination.  Meanwhile, the strange little nurse scrambled around the medical center mumbling to herself, tilting her head and answering herself.  She was always busy, but never seemed to mind. 

    Emma went to the health center to talk to the children through the windows. They were greased down with oil from their heads to the bottom of their feet to keep them from developing scars.  This was probably the best treatment to apply because when it was all over, the children suffered little scarring. 

    Small Pox Victim

During all this time, everyone was in complete quarantine, even the dog. No one could leave campus, and the fence was the limit, even though the school was surrounded by desert. They were all becoming tired of each other and then finally, three days before Christmas, when everyone had been successfully vaccinated and the health center was child-free, the quarantine was lifted.

    Arrangements were hurriedly executed and the activity of getting home for Christmas was exhilarating.  If home was too far away, teachers and staff found places to go where they had a change of scenery and could relax. 

    Emma delivered her charges north and decided to spend her holiday in Santa Fe.  She loved the farolito lights, colorful decorations, the red pork tamales, religious processions like the La Posada, posole, biscochitos, and piñon bonfires. She thought everyone should spend at least one Christmas in Santa Fe during their lifetime. 

    But Emma was not one to rest on her laurels.  She had heard of a child with eye problems at a mining camp near Gallup. She arrived around noon the day after Christmas and was directed to a rough building that held a large dining room. Because of the holiday, the miners were not working, and many of them were having lunch there. There was a little 11-year-old girl who was serving bowls of food to the tables. She was being paid 50 cents per week for a seven day work week that began at dawn and ended in the dark.    

    The child’s eyes were extremely red and oozing. Emma located the girl’s father, a large, rough Polish miner who told her he did not know the whereabouts of the mother and the girl had never been to a doctor.  Emma convinced him that she had State authority to take her to get treatment and go to school. 

    The father got his daughter’s coat and the few other pieces of clothing she owned. They got in Emma’s waiting car and the driver took them to Gallup. At the hotel, she bathed her and with some washcloths and warm water, greatly improved the appearance of her eyes, although they were still inflamed.

    After breakfast the next morning, they wandered over to the station to await their train. Suddenly, two men appeared - - one who  came up only to Emma’s shoulder with a face twisted into perpetual anger- the other was a big man wearing a Stetson, a badge and a gun at his belt. The cruel looking man ran the restaurant at the mine and according to him, Emma had no right to take the child. She asked him if he had the 11-year-old under a contract. He said he didn’t need a contract and was taking her back where she belonged. 

    “Over my dead body,” Emma said. Words flew between the two.  Finally a big, hearty laugh came from the sheriff. He said, “Come on man; I'm taking you back to camp - - you're not getting anywhere here." He steered the mean, diminutive man back to the mine, and Emma and the girl boarded the train to El Paso for an ophthalmological appointment. 

    At Mr Pratt's request, but much against Emma’s resolve, she was told to carry a revolver in her satchel. She was often offered advice that the place she was headed was dangerous; she said she could predict what words the warning would begin with,”I have a daughter of my own…” 

    She said she had  never needed her revolver, and never used it except for target practice, but fantasized this time of bopping the child’s raging employer on his noggin with the grip of her gun. Fortunately, she did not act upon it.

    In El Paso, two doctors examined the child and came up with the diagnosis: trachoma. The doctors turned her eyelids inside out and scrubbed them with a medicated brush. Each week she was to go to the nurse at the school clinic where she would receive the same treatment. It took four months before her eyes were infection free. Some of her vision was saved, but her eyes were badly scarred.

    Around this time, a former teacher at the school visited the Institute. She was Elizabeth Garrett. Her mother was Spanish from Northern New Mexico, and her father was the famous sheriff, Pat Garrett. Pat was renowned for having captured the notorious Billy the Kid. In fact, he captured him twice! The first time, Billy was jailed and sentenced to be hanged, but managed to escape. Patrick followed Billy to Fort Sumner and there, shot him. Pat was known as a tough man when necessary, but always very gentle and kind to Elizabeth.

    Emma was enchanted with Miss Garrett who then lived in Long Island, New York and earned her living by singing. She told wonderful tales of growing up in New Mexico Territory and of her parents, particularly her father. In the evenings, the students and staff would sit around Garrett on the lawn and listen to her tales, some exciting, some sad, but most of them a living history lesson of New Mexico.

Pat Garrett and Elizabeth's Youngest Sister

    The evenings during the few weeks Elizabeth visited were glorious. Her entourage would sit on the lawn while the sunset crept behind the San Andres Mountains. Then the moon rose followed by millions of stars. Under the expansive sky, Elizabeth told stories and sang song after song, all in Spanish. Emma’s favorites were “La Paloma” and “La Golondrina.”

    In 1915, three years after New Mexico was admitted to the U.S. as the 47th state, Garrett wrote ”O Fair New Mexico.” Written in the form of a tango, it was officially adopted as New Mexico's state song in 1917. John Philip Sousa, famous military march composer, made an arrangement of the song in 1928. 

    Garrett was in the process of moving to Roswell, where she would teach piano, continue writing songs, devote her time to serving as a Board of Regent’s member for the Institute for the Blind, and perform around the country. 

    Elizabeth was friends with the blind/deaf author and political activist Helen Keller and her former teacher and lifelong companion, Anne Sullivan. The two would visit the “Songbird of the Southwest" at her home in Roswell and in Santa Fe to help Elizabeth lobby for the Institute in Alamogordo, and for the blind in the State of New Mexico. 

    Their lobbying activity to convince legislators to give state taxpayer money to her causes often began with a joke from Elizabeth Garret.  She said she was there to fight for the blind and deaf in New Mexico.  She quipped, “Quite frequently, my father had to bring harmony with a gun. I always have tried to do so by carrying a tune.”

    Around the time Garrett’s visit ended, Emma began to receive letters from her fiance, Harold Minturn, with a return address of a post office box in New York City.  Since German Kaiser Wilhelm II, Queen Victoria’s grandson, abdicated and the war ended at 11 o’clock, on the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, Emma had received no correspondence from Harry.  She assumed he was in Europe and was cleaning up the mess the “Huns” made with their destructive war.  “Huns” was a derogatory term used by the Allied forces to define the barbarism of the German forces.

    Harry explained that he had not been sent to Europe but had served as a mechanic in upstate New York. Now he was in the city trying to make his fortune as a salesman. Minturn had grown up with his parents and brother in boarding houses in Kansas, Missouri, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and several places in between, so he knew that a post office box was the best place to receive his mail while he was “transient.” 

    Emma’s tall, slender, dark haired, blue eyed soldier had been mustered out of the Army with no missing limbs or eyes, no mustard gas respiratory problems or chemical burns that disfigured his face or caused blindness. Unlike many soldiers who returned from Europe, he had not suffered from the loss of fingers or feet from trench foot, frostbite, or gangrene infections. 

    He was not one of the disfigured  “gueules cassées,” - “broken faced men,” missing noses, jaws, cheekbones, ears or eyes. These men often went to a Tin Nose Shop to have custom, thin copper masks made. The prosthetic masks, crafted by sculptors on painted copper, were designed to resemble the soldier's pre-injury appearance as closely as possible with eyes, eyebrows, cheek definition, mouths, and ears painted over a base coat matched to the soldier's skin tone. 

    The copper coverings were held on by a tin wire or a ribbon and kept civilians from recoiling at the sight of the veterans’ disfigurements of missing cheekbones, jaws, noses, or eyes,  but did not always cover the psychological trauma the wounded had  suffered from the Great (horrible) War.

  Tin Nose Masks to Cover Missing Face Features

 Emma was far away from the consequences of World War I.  Her brother had been drafted, but like her fiance, stayed state side and was now safe and sound back in Chambersburg.  The nearest Emma had come to the war was when an  incident occurred during the Mexican Revolution. Pancho Villa and his Villistas had raided Columbus, and General Pershing from El Paso’s Fort Bliss was ordered to keep Pancho Villa out of New Mexico and back where he belonged. 

    After General Pershing's unsuccessful invasion of Mexico, his 6000 troops headed back to the borderland.  Several squads of his soldiers were making a summer foray into the Sacramento Mountains to train in the fresh mountain air. Pershing’s entourage of gallant cavalrymen  passed through Alamogordo to get to their destination and camped in the park under the trees which Alamogordo was named after. They were staying under the fat cottonwoods over the weekend and would head up the mountain on Monday.

    A  dance soiree was held for the troops in town on Saturday evening; the orchestra from The Institute for the Blind furnished the music and one of the students whose home was in Alamogordo attended the dance. Several months later, the teenage girl told Miss Hamsher she didn’t feel well enough to attend class. 

    Emma sent her student to the health clinic where they discovered that she was pregnant. The girl  didn’t know the soldier’s last name; she only knew that he was a homesick, terribly unhappy boy from the South who had told her that she was a wonderful dancer, how lovely she was, how he had never met a girl as understanding and kind as she was, and had asked her if he could see her again as soon as he received a leave of duty. By the time the girl discovered her predicament, Pershing and his troops had been sent overseas to France. 

    The pregnant girl’s mother had been dead for several years and her older sister had taken over raising the children.  The big sister did not allow her littler sister back in the house.  The school nurse suggested the girl go to El Paso where there was a home for unwed mothers; she remained until the baby was born and adopted. She then came back to live on the campus until she graduated.

    Emma shook her head at the girl’s naivete and the opportunism of the young man. The school was quite strict with boy/girl activity on the campus and during field trips.  The students and staff were warned of hereditary blindness and discouraged relationships between students.  Emma vowed to keep a more diligent watch on her female charges and spoke to them about piety and purity. Society placed a high value on a woman's virtue, and warnings were given against activities that were considered detrimental to a girl's moral standing.

    Meanwhile, Emma was contemplating the end of her five year teaching stint in New Mexico with mixed feelings.  She was anxious to begin a family of her own, but leaving the children with whom she lived and worked was going to be gut wrenching. This had been the most interesting, exciting, and rewarding experience she had ever encountered. Her blind children had been her teachers; she said she had learned more from them than they had from her.

    As the school year ended in 1921, it would also grieve her to leave  the land of enchantment; she would miss the grandeur of the mountains, the desert, the indescribable sunsets, the homey little adobe houses which grew out of the brown land, and the friendly population of Anglo, Spanish, and Native people.

    Emma had made close friends in Alamogordo; one was a priest who corresponded with other churches to help Emma locate blind children. The Father came from Germany for the “cure.” He had tuberculosis and the dry, desert air helped him heal and he fell in love with the area and remained.

    Emma became friends with an English couple - the husband was also a “lunger” with tuberculosis.  The gentleman was a billiard buff and they had one room built onto their adobe house which was known as the Billiard Room. They taught the young school teacher to play billiards and frequently invited her to spend an evening with them doing nothing but playing billiards after dinner. 

    Superintendent Pratt and Mrs. Pratt also doted on Emma.  The school doctor who brought his children and his  tubercular wife from New York to Alamogordo were also quite close with Miss Emsher.  Everyone wished she would stay, but understood she had extended her engagement for a long time and was at the upper end of the age for marriage. It was time to be taken care of by a loving husband.

    Before she left, she had taken a group of children for a picnic at a mountain park on top of a small canyon several miles from school. After lunch, Emma told the students she was going to hike down to the stream close by to fill a  bucket with drinking and washing-up water.  She made them promise to stay just where they were until she returned. Several of the children had partial vision and she knew they could be trusted to make sure this happened.

    As she hiked down the hill, the bucket fell out of her hand and dropped noisily, clang, clang, clanging down the rocky mountain to the stream. She retrieved it, filled it, and hiked back to the children where she found everyone where they had been, but now on their knees, some crying, with hands folded, praying for her. They thought she had fallen with the bucket. 

    She wondered how she could leave them and never see them again. It was a difficult decision to make, but she wanted to finally marry the man she had kept waiting for so long. When they returned to school, she began packing for the trip back east. Mr. and Mrs. Pratt put her on the train the next day. She found her seat and waved to them where they stood  on the platform; she had  tears in her eyes and a pain in her heart while she watched little Alamogordo, sitting at the foot of the Sacramento Mountains, and her dearest friends roll out of sight.

  Alamogordo Train Depot Grounds

  Emma was married in Chicago in August of 1921 in a civil ceremony in a courtroom, no family nor friends attended.  Her husband, Harold Disney Minturn, was reported as being a stockbroker in the Windy City. Emma’s achievements were listed extensively in the Chambersburg newspaper wedding announcement - graduate of Temple Baptist College, teacher, field officer, accomplished public speaker.  Her father was the late artist, T.O. Hamsher.  He had died of tuberculosis when Emma was five years old.  

    Unbeknownst to his bride, Harry had been married before in 1917 in Kansas City to a young, local woman. Harry worked as an advertising man while living at the Densmore Hotel when he married Roby Singleton, daughter of the recently deceased Dr. J.M. Singleton; she had inherited a healthy fortune.  They were married for less than a year during which time, the man of the house (Harry) typically controlled the household purse strings.

    The tumultuous alliance ended in a lawsuit which was eventually settled with his first wife’s family. Harold Minturn had accused his spouse’s household of alienation of affection and sued them for $50,000, over $1,250,000 in today’s money.  They reached a settlement just to quell the town gossip and he was paid a secret sum and given a motor car to leave town. 

    Toward the end of the divorce settlement, Harry was drafted at age 29 (just missing the 30 year old cut-off) and preparing to leave for Pennsylvania where he would soon be introduced to Emma Hamsher.  

    When the judge overseeing the divorce trial told Mr. Minturn he had to leave Kansas City, Harry replied that the U.S. Government had superceded that command and that he was a former Cavalry soldier and was glad to be going back to the military. As he was catching his train bound for boot camp in Pennsylvania, he lied to a newspaper reporter that he was leaving to attend Officer Training School in Illinois.

    There are no military records of Minturn serving in the U.S. Cavalry.  Census records showed him working as a messenger and a stenographer in Kansas while living with his parents and brother in a boarding house.  His father worked in a department store and his brother Raymond went to business school and was drafted the same time as Harry; Raymond would later become a successful engineer.

    Near the end of 1919, Harry’s address changed from a New York to a Chicago post office box.  Harry wrote that the job prospects there were much better and that he was working as a stockbroker.  He said he would live cheaply in a boarding house until they married and he would be looking for an apartment for them in a nice area - near the Loop.

    Apparently, when Harry mustered out of the military, he moved to Manhattan where he married a woman six years younger than he was, Beatrice Bovee, who had a peddler’s licence at a pier in Brooklyn.  The couple moved to Chicago in 1920 for financial reasons; they lived with his wife's mother, Belle Bovee, a dry goods saleswoman who also took in boarders to make ends meet.

    Harry Disney Minturn married Emma Hamsher in August of 1921. He had found them an apartment on the fashionable North side of Chicago, walkable to Lake Michigan and not too far from the elevated train known as the “Loop.” Chicago fascinated Emma; it was beautiful, exciting, interesting, and enjoyable. A year and a half later, a son was born, Raymond Hamsher Minturn.  He lived for nineteen days. A year after that, a daughter arrived stillborn.  

    Emma took a job with the Chicago Public Schools as a teacher after the painful experience of losing two babies. The rules had relaxed and married women could teach in Chicago as long as they did not become pregnant or have children. 

    Emma had come into the marriage with a savings account from her five years of teaching and summer field work duties. Harry began to work on a project as a contractor, becoming a founding member building a private country club with a 26 acre lake.

    In 1928, Emma resigned from her job when she discovered she was pregnant.  She had a healthy baby girl, Anne Leigh Minturn, who required every bit of Emma’s attention.  Six months after she was born, her parents took her with them on a celebratory cruise from Florida to Cuba. 

    The year 1929 was a banner year for Cuba until the Wall Street Crash in October.  Gerardo Machado, President of Cuba, was willing to pocket any bribe from any foreigner who wanted permits to own and operate hotels, restaurants, gambling casinos, and brothels. Tourism increased markedly in Cuba and tax revenues allowed for a  central highway to be built; money for public education spending increased, and investment in industrialization began - until it all crashed along with the Stock Market.

    The Great Depression ended the bubble of the Roaring 20’s. Emma was not working and slowly became a “grass widow.”  A “sod widow’s” husband is six feet under; a grass widow’s husband stops coming home.  But Emma announced to all that she had in fact become a “widow,” to avoid the shame of whatever there was to be ashamed of with a husband who had disappeared.  

    Emma eventually became the manager of an apartment/hotel overlooking Lake Michigan. She and Anne lived there until Anne matriculated from Chicago Girls’ Latin School and then attended Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts, where she graduated in 1949. 

    Meanwhile, Harry married Helene Smith in Panama City, Florida in 1937 and five years later, a Florida newspaper's legal posting ran for four weeks announcing that Helene Minturn of Panama City, Florida was divorcing Harold Disney Minturn of Biloxi, Mississippi who had vanished.  

    After World War I, divorces increased notably during the Roaring Twenties.  Hasty marriages were common during war time. A husband sometimes returned a stranger after the trauma of battle but divorce was still stigmatized, especially for women.  Divorcee was synonymous with “loose woman.” 

    Divorce was fault-based and difficult to prove and obtain. Some churches did not recognize divorce; it was easier in a time before computer databases, social media, facial recognition and tracking devices to simply disappear a few states or a coastline far away.

    Three years later, Harry died in Los Angeles, California, less than ten miles from his second wife, Beatrice Bovee Johnsan, now a Hollywood socialite whose soirees made the newspaper thanks to the wealth of her new husband.  

    An application was submitted by an anonymous person to the Veterans Administration requesting a headstone for Harry at Los Angeles National Cemetery; he had died two months after the end of World War II, twenty-five short years after his military service ended following World War I. 

    Emma and Harry’s daughter, Anne Minturn, had been given a research assistantship at Harvard and Emma decided to apply for a job in nearby Boston’s Perkins School for the Blind. She called Perkins to set up an appointment for an interview, but since Emma’s teaching credentials had lapsed, the only job available was an office secretarial position for the bursar. 

    The bursar was extremely helpful and asked Emma what type of job she was really looking for. He suggested she go to The Statler Hotel in Boston the following week to attend a meeting of administrators from various schools for the blind; he arranged for Emma to meet some of the superintendents. She met with Dr. Francis M. Andrews from the Maryland School for the Blind. 

    Emma told Dr. Andrews that she had presented a speech twenty-seven years ago at a conference on his campus. She remembered how beautiful the grounds were - lawns filled with magnificent elms and oaks, an orchard, woods filled with birds, wild flowers, and a brook running through the forest. At 19 years old, she had sat by the brook to practice her progressive presentation that she later gave to hundreds of educators dedicated to working with the blind.

    The  vacancy at the Maryland School for the Blind was for a dietitian. She was not a dietician, but she no longer had a teaching license and the Superintendent convinced her she could do the job until something became available that she preferred. She asked about budgeting and he replied that as long as she fed the children, the teachers and staff well, there would be no problem.   She accepted and stayed at the school until she retired in 1972.

    But, Emma would not rest on her laurels. She began lobbying her Superintendent to create a new position called  “Home Visitor.”  The Home Visitor would travel the State of Maryland to advise and counsel mothers of babies born prematurely who developed blindness. Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP) beat out venereal disease after the advent of penicillin as the leading cause of childhood blindness.  

    The Home Visitor would teach the mothers how to teach their children until they were old enough to attend school. The Home Visitor would provide resources and referrals for the families of children with vision problems and would go from town to town to seek out new babies who qualified for the services.  

    After the position of Home Visitor was established, Emma nominated herself for the job.  The Superintendent hired her and she spent the next twenty years as the Maryland School for the Blind Home Visitor. She traipsed the state from north to south, east to west in her automobile, no longer needing to take a train nor a horse.  She hand typed a memoir after she retired; her last chapter oddly mimicking her first chapter.

      Maryland School for the Blind

  In 1974, Emma went to live with her daughter, Dr. Anne Leigh Minturn, professor of social psychology at University of Colorado at Boulder.  Dr. Minturn’s publications included women’s and children’s issues, cross-cultural perspectives and extensive research she gathered in India.  “Mothers of Six Cultures,” “Sita’s Daughters,” and “Rajputs of Khalapur” were a few of her publications.

    Emma’s obituary in 1985 was titled, “Emma Minturn, She Taught the Blind.” Her story of teaching in Alamogordo, New Mexico was premier, along with the “fact” that she had been a widow for many years.  Her adventures of riding trains, travelling horseback, riding in wagons, and in rented automobiles through the desert to make sure she found every blind student in the state defined her life. 

    Emma’s daughter,  Anne,  named after Anne Sullivan, teacher of Helen Kellar, died in an Egypt Air plane crash off Nantucket in 1999. She was seventy years old.  In her will, she bequeathed a collection of New Mexican artifacts, (gifts from parents of blind children to Emma), to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University.  The Pueblo storyteller clay dolls, figurines, bowls, Navajo and Apache baskets, and other artifacts were each small enough to fit into Anne’s mother’s leather shoulder bag she'd carried onto trains, horse’s backs, and in rented cars.  Even the santo of Joseph, caretaker of children, now displayed in the Harvard museum, once fit perfectly into Emma’s well-traveled satchel.

 

Story Teller

Part II - Emma Hamsher, Thoroughly Modern Twentieth Century Teacher

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…