High School Senior

June 27, 1998

“To business that we love we rise betime,
And go to’t with delight.”

Antony, Antony and Cleopatra,
Act IV Sc. 4

About ten days ago, when son John was videotaping and interviewing me, one of his questions punched the ATM buttons of my memory bank. I mentioned that I had been released from all classes the last half of my senior year at Everett High School.

In high school I was enrolled in the Commercial Course, I learned the skills of typing, shorthand, business forms and correspondence, double-entry bookkeeping, adding and calculating machines, etc. What I missed were certain courses in the College Preparatory division, particularly algebra and geometry.

I was in the Commercial Course partly from choice and partly from advice of aunts and uncles who emphasized that with my father dead, there was no way I could think of college because I needed to go to work full-time as soon as possible. Furthermore, as Uncle John Granstrom said to me, with my grandfather nodding approval, “Girls need college, not the boys. A man can always pick up a shovel and find laborer’s work, but a woman needs a college education if her husband should die.” They probably had the economic plight of my widowed mother in mind. I don’t believe that careers for women per se mattered to them or even occurred to them.

This advice was given years before the Great Depression, so these well-meaning relatives did not know that there was to be economic disaster with few laborers’ jobs to be had until the New Deal of the FDR years brought the WPA, the CCC and other measures. Thanks to the “commercial” courses, I had jobs all through the depression.

However, there was a reckoning when I went to St. Lawrence University in the 1940s. I was admitted on probation until I acquired high school credits for algebra and geometry. I went to Canton High School to qualify in these subjects. I surmise I was something like the little girl in the clip-art below:

[Editor’s note: cartoon girl with speech bubble, saying “Plato was a thinker who died in the year 347 and wasn’t born until 427. He thought out how to do this.”]

I still recall the strangeness and discomfort of that experience. I was old enough to be the parent of the high school sophomores in class with me. I may have been older than the teacher. It was a great relief to finish that requirement.

I have a good memory of the work/study program of Everett High School, January to July, 1929. In the Commercial Course there was opportunity for a few students to skip the last half of the school year and work in business. Those chosen had to have excellent marks, of course; and I was one of those qualified and chosen.

So I reported to the Milk St., Boston, office of Percy Gleason, a Certified Public Accountant. He had a woman assistant whose name I forget. She and I worked the outer office and Mr. Gleason had the inner office. The duties were not difficult: typing, correspondence, reports, tax returns, adding and checking columns of figures, filing, etc.

Most rewarding of all, I was paid $14 a week. The fares on the “Elevated” were not much, so I had more dollars than I had previously delivering groceries afternoons and Saturdays.

I did miss out on Senior social life – parties, the Senior Picnic at Norumbega Park on the Charles River (canoes, eating, dancing, necking), the Senior Prom, etc. But I wouldn’t have been participating anyway. I had some regrets about missing that part of high school life, but there were many of us in that graduating class of about 450 who for various reason did not take part in Senior social activities.

Another benefit of working for Percy Gleason, I was able to buy a new blue-serge suit, black shoes, white shirt for graduation.

The experience of this high school senior was not the usual one, but my regrets were minor and the benefits of that working experience were major. The most important lesson, perhaps, can be put in a sentence, “When you are on the job, arrive on time or before, work diligently, and stay until five PM.”