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Sesquicentennial Interview: Lela Duff

When: 1974

This interview was conducted in 1974 as part of the I Remember When television series produced by the Ann Arbor Public Library.

Transcript

  • [00:00:11] FEMALE_1: How did you get involved in Ann Arbor Yesterdays was a newspaper article? It started as a series of articles, and Pioneer School is a book. But how did you become involved in writing up your memoirs?
  • [00:00:25] LELA DUFF: Well, I first began writing Pioneer School through the newspaper too at the time of the centennial of Ann Arbor High School. It was thought at that time that it could be published for the centennial. Then they decided they couldn't afford to do anything like that. Someone suggested that I go down and interview the editor, Mr. Gallagher, and see if he could use them. He had me write up two or three samples, bring them in, and presented them to a board and so forth. They decided that it would have some interest as a column. In that way, I went ahead writing one every week for that or more frequently, I've forgotten how often. I wrote that clear up through the building of the Frieze Building, which was then the high school after the fire from the earliest times. Then when I got through with that, there was some thought that perhaps the Board of Education would put it in a book. However, I said then well, I have a lot I'd like to say about the older teachers who were in school who were teaching when I first came as a young teacher. On the strength of that, I wrote what I called my album of teachers basing it on an old photograph, and picking the ones that had been connected with the school between them for all four quarter centuries. That group of teachers had known the school over that span of years. Not that every one of them had, but some got into all four. [LAUGHTER]
  • [00:02:38] FEMALE_1: When did you begin teaching at Ann Arbor High?
  • [00:02:40] LELA DUFF: During World War I, the fall of 1917.
  • [00:02:46] FEMALE_1: Did you live in town before then?
  • [00:02:48] LELA DUFF: No. Just when I was in the university.
  • [00:02:52] FEMALE_1: Do you remember the old Union High School at all?
  • [00:02:57] LELA DUFF: No. I wasn't here in 1904 when it burned. You mean that building? No. I just know that from pictures and in great many descriptions. A number of my friends had been in high school at that time. The friends that I made later and told me all sort of tales about the fire, and about the old school.
  • [00:03:24] FEMALE_1: Can you tell us some of those? Tell us what they remembered about old Union High and the fire?
  • [00:03:31] LELA DUFF: Well, I don't remember. I think at the moment of an anecdote about the fire that would be particularly appropriate here, but I could tell you what I learned in studying the biographies of the older teachers. Mr. Wines, for instance, was one of the oldest. When he came, of course there was just one building and it was on the far side of the block, and toward the back. The rectangular building and three stories high. He was drafted [LAUGHTER] you might say, to come there and teach, because they were having trouble with discipline. The teacher who had preceded him left in defeat. He couldn't manage those boys in the math classes. This, young Levi Wines hadn't intended to be a teacher. He had taken engineering, and he had been working on a Great Lakes project of a study of the lakes. The superintendent happened to think about young Wines and thought maybe he had heard that that job had finished. They were through with the Great Lakes study and that he was at loose ends. He went over to the Wines father's house and asked Levi who was a tall, spindling young fellow, and quite shy, and apparently not too forceful, if he would come and take over. Well, he did. The first day, this is what his wife told me as a very old lady. She was much younger than he. She told me this while I was writing the incidents that the first day some of the boys started acting a little smart. I think some of them came into the room and lay down on the seats. He said nothing till the bell rang and then he got up. He said, "I have come now to teach you people. But I think I ought to warn you before we undertake our work, that my trouble is a very ungovernable temper." He said, "If anything should annoy me, if you should do anything to rouse my temper, it would take no time at all till I would have you by the collar and have you over to one of those windows, and hurl you out. I wouldn't be responsible. You would land on the pavement below." Well, that surprised and scared them, so that he never [LAUGHTER] had any trouble after that. There was one episode of the disappearance of some large spheres that he had made to illustrate solid geometry. He and Mr. Chute between them had some very comical plan of detecting who it was, who did it, and they discovered it. But I can't tell you that. Now, perhaps I did tell it in my book, but it was very funny too.
  • [00:07:31] FEMALE_1: How about you? Did you have any problems with discipline as a teacher?
  • [00:07:34] LELA DUFF: Well, not like that. I think any teacher occasionally has to be a little stiff and severe, but I never had what I'd call a serious problem here. The school was very well organized by the time I came, and it was really easy from that point of view I think. Of course, there were pranks that went on around the school, but I never had any trouble in my classes, and the pranks were funny. They were not serious.
  • [00:08:08] FEMALE_1: Can you tell us some of those pranks?
  • [00:08:11] LELA DUFF: Well, There was one favorite of removing the head from a huge statue of Lincoln that dominated the vista of the great long hall. Every once in a while that head would come up missing. They could lift it off, you see. But I don't know how they finally took care of that. But eventually, it didn't seem to happen anymore. After a few years, it got to be an old joke, I suppose. It was really a very well behaved school on the whole.
  • [00:09:03] FEMALE_1: Do you remember things like were they still having the fancy dress party at the end of the years, the girls fancy dress party?
  • [00:09:10] LELA DUFF: Yes. They were quite elaborate affairs and quite delightful. The girls spent a great deal of time and money even on their costumes. Boys weren't allowed to come, and there was that which I told him in one of the articles that prank, some boys getting up above the stage in the attic and boring a little hole down. Peeking down at the thing. But I don't think they ever saw anything that made it very much worthwhile. One of the boys confessed it to me later, and I mentioned it in Pioneer school. But he wrote me then from California that I got it all wrong and that something was this way or that way. [LAUGHTER] I don't know just how it happened. But the girls at the party and the teachers never knew that it happened.
  • [00:10:13] FEMALE_1: What is your best memory about teaching at Ann Arbor High?
  • [00:10:19] LELA DUFF: Well, I can't say that there's any one best memory. It was a delightful experience. Most teachers stayed a long time because they liked to teach here. It was a very coveted position. Because of that reason, the teachers were fairly well paid at that time that is it compared well with Detroit and other larger schools. There was a cooperation among the teachers and a very friendly feeling between pupils and teachers, that I think all the years I taught were very pleasant. I enjoyed giving little plays, directing little plays, that Shakespearean circle. I gave a little club. I enjoyed supervising or advising the Omega the year book. But I also just thoroughly enjoyed my classes, and the pupils, and many dear friends among the old pupils. I had a happy time and we all did. The teachers liked each other so well too.
  • [00:11:56] LELA DUFF: Of course when I came that school that is now the Frieze building, except for the annex that goes a little further along Washington Street, was only ten years old, you see? It was a very up-to-date building at that time and pleasant environment.
  • [00:12:23] FEMALE_1: Can you remember any of your, all the years you've taught any particular students?
  • [00:12:32] LELA DUFF: I remember so many particular students that I would hesitate to pick out one. I had some that were very good in writing and a great many that were very generally intelligent and able around the school, and some that found their work hard and were a pleasure to work with because you felt you could help them. I also had classes of children in from the country for a few years. I had a class in what they called grammar composition in which they were supposed to make up the lack of training that they had in the country school that would make them able to compete with those who had gone through the Ann Arbor system, and particularly had been the students of Mrs. Plympton, who was an eighth grade teacher, the eighth grade was in the basement of the building. There were four teachers, I think, in that group, and they put the children through a very grueling lot of grammar and technique of writing so that there weren't too many things to correct in their moderately good pupils as well as their best pupils. I had quite a time with some very delightful little youngsters in from the country. Well, they would say comical things sometimes, and I can think of various humorous things that came on in class, sometimes from pupils from other schools who came in and were required to enter that course. But most of my classes were the upper grades. I had more seniors than anything. All I usually had three classes of seniors. One in between somewhere and then those first few years, the children who weren't as well-prepared.
  • [00:15:17] FEMALE_1: You mentioned that you came during World War I. Was there anything, did the school, the student body, get involved in helping the war effort?
  • [00:15:25] LELA DUFF: Oh, very much. They were, of course, it was on their mind continuously. There was a little group of trainees in the boy's gym classes. They had simple uniforms and went through quite a lot of training. Then we had a little play that fostered the sale of liberty bonds that was written by one of the girls in the school and put on by this little club that I spoke of, and it was a great hit. Then, of course, I remember very clearly the reaction Armistice Day, which maybe read my article on Armistice Day in the Ann Arbor Yesterdays book, we really, it was a terrifically exciting day.
  • [00:16:32] FEMALE_1: Why don't you describe it to us here if you can a little bit?
  • [00:16:37] LELA DUFF: Well, to begin with, on Friday, there was a false report that the Armistice was signed. Then that proved to be wrong. But I remember when the bells began to ring, the church bells all over town, in the middle of the afternoon and most of the teachers were so intent on their classes that it didn't seem to register because I remember running out in the hall and running clear around the building to one of my best friends, Lurene Osborne's room and telling her, "Hear those bells? That means armistice." She was equally excited well then in a few minutes it got abroad, and they did dismiss school, and just general confusion began. But then the Armistice proper wasn't announced till I think early Monday morning, about 4:00, 5:00 am. We heard the bells again and everybody poured out in the streets and all day long, there were parades and all sorts of excitement. It was just a marvelous day for everybody. They just felt that life could go on now and no more worries.
  • [00:18:13] FEMALE_1: You mentioned before Mr. Wines, and you mentioned really briefly, Mr. Chute. Can you tell us a little bit more about some of the teachers you remember that were the great that you know?
  • [00:18:24] LELA DUFF: Well, I would think, corresponding to Mr. Wines in math and Mr. Chute in physics, that Miss Porter as a Latin teacher was perhaps the most outstanding personality. She was very stern, but also very humorous, and all the kids never tried any jokes on her. It was really quite severe. She was a rule of thumb sort of teacher. She saw to it that they knew their Latin, by the time they got through with her. Now, Miss Breed was equally fine as a teacher Latin, but a very kindly, gentle, sweet woman and loved the children and would sometimes play a little ridiculous jokes just to draw their attention to what they meant. But then Mr. Brian was a very famous history teacher. There were just the whole number that I took up there. A dozen of them, I think we're all very fine.
  • [00:19:56] FEMALE_1: Was Mr. Pattengill the principal?
  • [00:19:58] LELA DUFF: He was the principal before I came, but he died quite suddenly of pneumonia.
  • [00:20:09] LELA DUFF: I don't remember just how many years before I came, but three or four years or more, I think. But anyway, they had a succession of different principals for a short time, none of whom wished to stay. They wanted to develop their abilities elsewhere, and at the time that I came, Mr. Forsythe came that year, and he was a very fine principal and very able. Then after his long tenure, Mr. Nick Schreiber came just a few years before I left, and he too was a very delightful person and a very masterful sort of person. They both had things under control very well. But by the end of Mr. Schreiber's time, the school got so crowded that it was a great burden to them to carry on their classes, and the halls would be so crowded and everything was just jammed. That's when Pioneer School was built. It wasn't called Pioneer School for several years. It was called Ann Arbor High School until Huron was established, and they had to find another name because they both were branches, you see of Ann Arbor High School. The term Pioneer had been used of the teams for a number of years like the Tigers and Lions and so forth in professional football and Battle Creek where the Bearcats and all the other high schools in the league had a nickname. They had a school contest, The Optimist, newspaper of the school carried on a contest for a name and a little essay to justify it. A boy named Dick Mann suggested the pioneers and had a very forceful little essay in which he showed that Ann Arbor High had been a pioneer in all developments of education, and also in sports, in intercollegiate sports, and his title was chosen. After that, they were called the pioneers. So when they had to find a name for the school, when Huron High was established, it seemed quite appropriate that they just call it Pioneer High School because it was the pioneer. That is the building held the whole high school, which had been the pioneer.
  • [00:23:23] FEMALE_1: Being the only high school in town, was the high school very involved with community life as well as just day-to-day education?
  • [00:23:31] LELA DUFF: Yes. Of course, the students were all involved with their own backgrounds, and then there was a certain amount of effect of the university, somewhat a rivalry of horseplay and that sort of thing between students, high school and university students. But I don't recall that there was anything particular moment. Of course, the university students choose to do a great many pranks that was part of college life in those days was just instead of starting the rebellions that have come up in the general turmoil around the country in the last 10 years, the university students worked off their energies on pranks of one sort or another.
  • [00:24:44] FEMALE_1: Did the teachers ever pull any pranks on the students around the end of the year or Halloween just a little game?
  • [00:24:53] LELA DUFF: I don't think any pranks.
  • [00:24:56] FEMALE_1: Challenge them in sports?
  • [00:25:01] LELA DUFF: I don't know maybe sometimes the men did. We women teachers used to put on a stunt at the fancy dress party for a few years. It was quite a lot of fun, but I don't recall that was particularly a common element of the relationship.
  • [00:25:30] FEMALE_1: What were the stunts at the fancy dress party like? What kind of stunts?
  • [00:25:35] LELA DUFF: The girls put on stunts, too that was part of it. The different groups in different classes would have stunts. Along in the program that is the dancing would be interrupted and one of these little skits of some sort would be put on. Now I remember the first one that we put on, we were all dressed in the the idea of the Chinaman, in the old days with a long black tail, we wove them out of black stockings and the yellow spot like coats and black pants like slacks. This was an utter surprise to girls and we came all in in the movement that Chinese had, particularly in comedies bending over and taking little short steps and we made a circle and surprised them very much of that. Then, oh we had two or three little plays of one sort or another. One was a based on Alice In Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass. I've forgotten which one, the passage that starts out, the Walrus and the Carpenter were walking on the sand. Some of us were just oysters and different things in bags around the edge, and then the Carpenter was the secretary, Miss Kitson, who was a very tall lady. She was, I think, over about six feet tall, and the Walrus was Miss Porter, this quite plump and very sedate older teacher. She entered in it with great glee, and they went walking on the sand and carried on their conversation. That was quite funny that was up on the stage. Of course, everyone was particularly delighted to see Miss Porter in such a role because she was so severe in her personality usually around school.
  • [00:28:10] FEMALE_1: Were you an oyster?
  • [00:28:13] LELA DUFF: I suppose so. I don't remember my being [OVERLAPPING].
  • [00:28:15] FEMALE_1: I can't imagine you as an oyster.
  • [00:28:17] LELA DUFF: We were all rolled up in our little bags and didn't show our faces around the edges, but I've forgotten what other elements enter into it. They were based on the rhyme.
  • [00:28:32] FEMALE_1: You taught English and coached drama a little and worked on the Omega. When did you retire from teaching?
  • [00:28:39] LELA DUFF: In '52.
  • [00:28:41] FEMALE_1: That was over 40?
  • [00:28:43] LELA DUFF: It was 20 years ago, 22 years it will be this year.
  • [00:28:48] FEMALE_1: But you taught them for almost 40 years at Ann Arbor High?
  • [00:28:53] LELA DUFF: Actually, yes. I think 17, 52. It was 35 years actually of teaching, and three years before that and two years I had taught in other places. When I first came out here, I had secured a position in Detroit, but I didn't like it. It was, big city life didn't appeal to me, and I was in a rather difficult school and a junior high of little foreign youngsters who were quite different from my experience, and I liked them, but I felt I was out of my element. Mr. Forsythe called me up that was when Mr. Granville, who had been head of the English Department and came back to be for a long time afterward head of it, was drafted and school had started, and I had been in this school in Detroit for five weeks when Mr. Forsythe called me up. He knew me because I had taught under him in Ionia, and also in my hometown, St. Louis those few years. Asked if I had any desire to come out and if so, would I be able to get free in Detroit, and I said, I didn't know as to that, but I would dearly love to come out here. I had observed in Ann Arbor taking education and thought it would be just a very pleasant place to teach, and I loved the town. He said, you come out tomorrow afternoon after school, and I'll have you meet the superintendent and you can talk it over. So I hurried after school down by the old city hall in Detroit and got an interurban out, got here about five o'clock and interviewed the superintendent, Mr. Slauson. He was a very prim gentleman, and he didn't really give me too much encouragement. He asked me various questions that I thought a little bit embarrassing.
  • [00:31:29] LELA DUFF: I came out that Friday afternoon, and apparently, the interview went well enough. Mr. Slauson told me to see the superintendent in Detroit on Saturday. If he agreed to let me free from my position there to report Monday morning for work. I went back and went down to the little old building that they had for the administration building in Detroit at the time, little old red brick building and interviewed the superintendent. He was very gracious. He said they always had a long list of people just waiting to be placed and that he'd let me go. If I ever got tired of Ann Arbor and wanted to come back, that they wouldn't hold it against me. I came out, started teaching Monday morning. That was all it was to it.
  • [00:32:31] FEMALE_1: What in your 35 years of educating, how did you see education change?
  • [00:32:40] LELA DUFF: I guess that's quite obvious, isn't it? That there's been a great change in methods and all sorts of problems. The schools are much more crowded everywhere than they used to be. Of course, there have been quite different theories as to conducting of a class, and also in many ways, a great deal more freedom for students than there was. Although we gave them quite a bit of freedom, yet, there was a certain amount of formality in the class, but not the rigid formality of the earlier days. When I first came here, I thought Ann Arbor had a very free conducting of classes that there was a great deal of leeway for changes of pattern of what the pupils were doing and where they sat and what they were free to do than they had been before. But then shortly after that, there came in a great deal of change of philosophy of education, as you know. The John Dewey theories had got down as far as the actual classroom. That was very conspicuous all through the grades, and consequently, when we got the pupils, they were used to that greater freedom too. Of course, there was much more emphasis theoretically on the pupil than on the subject. I think they're always in our personal relation to the pupils. There always had been interest in the individual pupil. That is any good teacher, I'm sure, had a great deal more interest in the pupil, than some of the theorists gave them credit for. But it became just a sort of watchword. Now you're teaching not to teaching a subject you're teaching pupils, you're teaching boys and girls. Well, that was true. In a way, it was enriching too, even then. Well, of course, that has gone on and then in some places now there's been a stiffening up because of the various successes that have come about in the schools. Of course we had no problem with such things as dope. Occasionally, there would be some boys that would get a hold of some liquor at a party or before they came to a party and act kind of silly or something like that. But never did we have a pupil that you would call an alcoholic or one. Now, I don't mean that you do now, but there are certainly many that have got the drug habit according to what we read in the papers, and that makes a very great problem. Then there was no racial antagonism. We always had quite a little group of colored pupils, but they were always happy and popular. Sometimes they would be elected to positions in their classes, and once a boy was president of the student council, a colored boy, and I can think of some really brilliant colored children that we had and others that were somewhat underprivileged, but who lent themselves quite happily to the attempt we made to provide appropriate teaching for them. But there never were any of these riotous things going on in the halls that I recall at all. I think as to subject matter, there's considerable more freedom rather than sticking to some one text, then there was then, although we had a lot of outside reading and encouraged students in English to read widely. We did stick to texts, I think perhaps two more closely. Then language teaching became during that time, more functional, that they really used the language more during that time than they had previously, not just learning the rules of foreign language and the vocabulary, so that they had begun loosening up of subject matter and of method by that time that has continued to a very great degree, I'm sure.
  • [00:38:34] FEMALE_1: You mentioned John Dewey. Did you know Mr. Dewey when he was here in Ann Arbor?
  • [00:38:38] LELA DUFF: Oh no, that was long before my time.
  • [00:38:40] FEMALE_1: I didn't know.
  • [00:38:41] LELA DUFF: He had become famous and was well along in late middle age when I came here as a young teacher. But he did come here one time to Schoolmasters Club when they had a big banquet. He had been one of the do you know what that Schoolmasters Club is? It's a state organization. I don't I haven't heard of their meeting lately, but they used to meet once a year, and they were people from all grades of teaching through university, from the whole gamut of teaching. They had this great meeting and committees were formed and they made studies and gave speeches and so forth. One year, they had John Dewey out here to a banquet at the union. I saw him, heard him and I've heard tales of his absent mindedness. If there's anything the least bit comical about a great person, that, story lives. One of them was that he was so absent minded that one time he started out with the baby carriage and the baby in the carriage while his wife went on with her work. After some hours, he came home and she said, where's the baby? He had forgotten just where he did leave the baby carriage and the baby. That's one of the stories about John Dewey that I had heard, but it was not in my day. It was, I don't know, maybe 20 years before that or more.
  • [00:40:39] FEMALE_1: With all your experience, if you had any advice to give students now, what would it be?
  • [00:40:44] LELA DUFF: Well, I would certainly urge them to try to get all they could out of the opportunities of school so that they would be as well educated as possible. Also to learn to understand their fellow students and their teachers and get a great deal out of their contacts with other people. I think that's the same as it was then, the same as it is today. I don't think there's any mature person who would say, what do you care whether you learn anything in school or not? Nor would they advise that you regard your teachers as enemies or that you fight your fellow students so that whatever the age is, those are principles, but whether they lived up to or not depends on how things go.