There Went The Neighborhood - Audio Interview: Christine Steeb Koning

Fri, 03/03/2023 - 3:27pm

When: February 16, 2022

Christine Steeb Koning attended Jones School as a preschooler in the late 1950s. Her mother, Jane Steeb, was a teacher at Jones School. Koning recalls visiting her mother’s classroom and hearing her speak on the radio about the planned closure of Jones School in the mid-’60s.

More interviews are available in the There Went The Neighborhood Interview Archive.

Transcript

• [00:00:00] HEIDI MORSE: Today is February 16th, 2022. I'm Heidi Morse, an archivist at the Ann Arbor District Library, and I'm speaking with Christine Koning about Jones School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Could you please say and spell your name?
• [00:00:16] CHRISTINE STEEB KONING: Christine, C-H-R-I-S-T-I-N-E. Koning, K-O-N-I-N-G.
• [00:00:25] HEIDI MORSE: What was your maiden name?
• [00:00:27] CHRISTINE STEEB KONING: Steeb. S-T-E-E-B
• [00:00:31] HEIDI MORSE: Great. When and where did you grow up?
• [00:00:38] CHRISTINE STEEB KONING: I grew up in Ann Arbor from 1960 until I graduated from college, so that would've been 1978, with only one year off. I was in Dexter for one year. I went to school in Ann Arbor from preschool all the way through my master's degree with the exception of second grade.
• [00:01:05] HEIDI MORSE: What brought your family to Ann Arbor? Do you know?
• [00:01:10] CHRISTINE STEEB KONING: No, I don't really. I know we had family, my grandmother lived in Detroit and my father's mother lived in Ann Arbor, which could have been part of it. I know that we lived in New York before we moved to Ann Arbor. Both of my parents went to Wayne State University, which is where they met. But I'm not really quite sure how we picked Ann Arbor unless my mom had a job offer, which could have been the case. I don't really know [OVERLAPPING].
• [00:01:47] HEIDI MORSE: That's fine. Could you tell us a bit more about your mother, starting with her name?
• [00:01:54] CHRISTINE STEEB KONING: My mother's name was Jane, J-A-N-E, middle initial M, she always used that, and last name, Steeb, S-T-E-E-B. She was educated, like I said, at Wayne State University, bachelor's and master's. She was an elementary school teacher her entire career. I would say probably without any reservation that her happiest years were at Jones. She loved working in that building. She loved the other teachers, she adored the kids. They had a great principal, and to the day she died, she still talked about how clean the custodian kept the floors. She then went--after Jones closed she taught a couple of other places in Ann Arbor, but I know she never enjoyed them as much as she did Jones. That was her favorite job.
• [00:02:56] HEIDI MORSE: Do you know when your mother was born? Approximately.
• [00:03:04] CHRISTINE STEEB KONING: May 27th, 1927.
• [00:03:10] HEIDI MORSE: Do you have a favorite memory of her, whether it's at Jones School or just growing up?
• [00:03:18] CHRISTINE STEEB KONING: I have a lot of nice memories. But I think that probably some of the best ones were watching her, I got to go into her classroom sometimes, which I thought made me cooler than all the other kids [LAUGHTER] in my preschool. I think that's one of the ones I liked best was watching her interact with her kids. I was really jealous of them too because she used to call them my kids. I remember asking her until I was an adult. Which kids did you like better? [LAUGHTER] Which kids, my kids? But she really did think of them like that. Like I said, probably one of them was, strangely enough, going to a funeral at an all-Black church, which I had never been to in my life and I was a teenager. One of those 12 kids that I mentioned that were in that family had passed away. I believe she had cancer. The mother was insistent that my mom be there because she'd had most of those kids as students, including the young lady who passed away. It was really fascinating to go to somewhere my mom had never been with her and observe the different customs and activities and stuff and then talk with her about it afterwards. That was pretty cool. That and the car ride to St. Joseph Hospital with my little brother. We got stopped by the police because we were speeding [LAUGHTER].
• [00:05:03] HEIDI MORSE: [LAUGHTER]. Oh no.
• [00:05:08] CHRISTINE STEEB KONING: Well, it wasn't as catastrophic as it may sound. My brother had asthmatic bronchitis, so he was in the hospital every couple of months the whole time we were growing up. When he'd get sick, he'd come in and get me and not my mother. I looked at him and I'm like, "Yeah, your fingertips are turning blue [LAUGHTER] and you don't look too good. Okay, get your robe and slippers on, I'll go get mom to start the car." I got him ready and we went down and I had to sit with him and I was the one that had to explain to the police officer, could he please stop stopping us because we needed to get to St. Joe's and take my brother to see the doctor [LAUGHTER]. Don't mess with an indignant 12-year-old. Then I spent the rest of the evening in the play room all by myself because everybody else was asleep [LAUGHTER]. It was one of the few times I really saw my mom--I realized the difference in the way we approached things. It was her child, so she was considerably scared and stuff. But I was just like, "Come on, mom. We've been through this a million times. It's not that big a deal [LAUGHTER]."
• [00:06:24] HEIDI MORSE: Where did your family live?
• [00:06:28] CHRISTINE STEEB KONING: For the first two years, we lived on Jackson Road, right across from Veterans Park. Diagonal across from it. Yes, I went sledding there and yes, I went skating there and then we lived, like I said, in Dexter for one year. That was when my mom discovered it's not a good idea to teach in a different district than your kids attend because the school vacations don't match. We moved back to Ann Arbor and we lived on Sequoia Parkway over near the corner of Maple and Miller. It was one of those new subdivisions back in the early '60s. We lived on Sequoia Parkway--we moved there when I was in third grade and we moved out when I was maybe a senior in high school. It was after my parents' divorce. My mom and dad sold the house and we moved over to Adrian Drive, which is just off of Stadium Boulevard. It's like townhouses.
• [00:07:31] HEIDI MORSE: You mentioned before I think that you attended preschool at Jones. What year was that?
• [00:07:37] CHRISTINE STEEB KONING: I did. Probably '58, '59. It would've ended in 1960 because I started kindergarten. It would've been the very late '50s. It was down in the basement.
• [00:07:55] HEIDI MORSE: Just briefly because I want to save the possibility that we might want you to come in for a filmed interview, if you're open to it. Do you remember much about the closure of Jones school in the mid '60s?
• [00:08:09] CHRISTINE STEEB KONING: No. Depending on what year it closed because I really can't remember but I want to say it must have been '66 maybe or' 67 because when my mom moved over to Wines school, I was at Forsythe. I don't remember a lot about it other than my mom was really upset. I heard bits and pieces about it as it was being discussed, but being a kid, I wasn't paying a lot of attention to it because I didn't really understand what it meant. But I do remember there were lots of school board meetings. I know my mom went to them, which was really unusual for her. I know they had a lot of teachers' meetings. She cried a lot. She was really upset about it and was worried about what's going to happen to the kids, what would happen to all the people that worked there. I know she was rather pleased that I went there for my senior year in high school because she felt like it was some sort of closing the circle. That was obviously five years later. But no, I don't really remember a lot about it closing other than there were lots of meetings. I remember how odd my mother's voice sounded on the radio because they interviewed her at some meeting. She spoke at some meeting. They played it on the news and I remember thinking, wow, I don't remember my mom's voice sounding like that, but she thought it was even weirder than I did, but I don't remember a lot about it closing. Just that it was really tough on the people that were there, I know that. I don't remember distinctly about it. Unfortunately, my brother would remember even less, I'm sure.
• [00:10:09] HEIDI MORSE: Okay.
• [00:10:10] CHRISTINE STEEB KONING: I can ask him. But if I was there in preschool, he was an infant. If I was four, he was only a year old, so he won't remember jack.
• [00:10:24] HEIDI MORSE: No, but this is great to hear what you do you remember about that. Just to wrap up here, what did you end up going on to do in your career or in your life?
• [00:10:38] CHRISTINE STEEB KONING: [LAUGHTER] I was a teacher.
• [00:10:41] HEIDI MORSE: You were a teacher, okay.
• [00:10:45] CHRISTINE STEEB KONING: I was going to be a physical therapist because at Forsythe we had to do a project on two careers we thought we might pursue and one had to be one that we'd never thought of before. I read about physical therapy and it sounded interesting and that was all well and good until I almost flunked Physics at the University of Michigan [LAUGHTER], at which point I decided that was not for me. I went on to become a vocational rehabilitation counselor for several years and then when my kids were little and my husband was teaching at a university in Connecticut where we lived, I could take classes for free. I went back and got my teaching certification and then I taught for 25 years.
• [00:11:32] HEIDI MORSE: That's great.
• [00:11:35] CHRISTINE STEEB KONING: So I actually became a teacher. Not an elementary school teacher. God, I hated elementary school. I didn't hate being in it, I just, like, this is not for me. I mean that was my mom's heaven on earth was being a first grade teacher. To me, that would be quite the opposite. I took the grades my mother would never have wanted to. Well, that's not true. She taught eighth grade one year for some reason in Detroit, I think, but she was a first grade teacher almost all the time and so was my grandmother.
• [00:12:10] HEIDI MORSE: Wow, it's a family tradition.
• [00:12:15] CHRISTINE STEEB KONING: I actually have a triplicate picture. I did it as a gift to them when I got my master's. Because my master's was in education. I went and got old pictures colorized, they look like paintings, but I have my grandmother in her master's hood, I had my mother in hers, and me and mine, all like in one of those triples.
• [00:12:39] HEIDI MORSE: That's a great gift.
• [00:12:41] CHRISTINE STEEB KONING: Now I have three copies of that picture because my mother and grandmother left me theirs. I'm like yeah, I already got this. I think I have four copies. We all have the same robes on because they were all master's in education.
• [00:13:04] HEIDI MORSE: Well, thank you so much, Christine, for speaking with me.
• [00:13:08] CHRISTINE STEEB KONING: You're welcome. I hope somebody tells you about Mr. Perry, though. The custodian.
• [00:13:13] HEIDI MORSE: I spoke with his granddaughter the other day.
• [00:13:19] CHRISTINE STEEB KONING: That's awesome. My mother used to swear you could eat off the floors because he kept them so clean. I don't know how he did it in elementary school. But yeah, feel free to contact me if there's any other way I can help you. I can give you my email address or whatever and if I do find those pictures, I will definitely shoot you a text and tell you that I found them because my mother used to do a unit, like I said, a Native American unit and they would build a wigwassawigamig, which is apparently the proper name for what those of us who don't know better call a teepee, or a wigwam. They would build that. She had a picture of the kids sitting in front of it and I think they took a picture more than once for the Ann Arbor News but I'm not 100 percent sure about that part. I know there's a picture though.