Florence Walrath understood the forces that shaped her life, seemed to grasp them even as they occurred and long after. if she was not emotional in her writing, she was deeply introspective, in many ways a natural memoirist. She kept apologizing for her grammar, but she knew precisely which stories were important enough to pull from her early life. There are no poor choices. Every memory is strong, it’s meaning clear. She was a natural writer. Florence was educated in one-room school houses. It was there she learned confidence and responsibility early on. She abandoned her education after a teacher in Shushan, N.Y. accused her (falsely, she said) of cheating. She couldn’t bear to return to that classroom and have people think she might be dishonest, so with her mother’s permission, she left school for good. She said she regretted not finishing her education, but she learned many important lessons in the special atmosphere of the one-room school house. There was an intimacy there unimaginable to schoolchildren in our time.
“The teacher we all loved and will never forget was Mary McNeil, who later married Martin McCarthy. If she had been my teacher all through school instead of one year, I would had more education as you can tell by reading this. She was so loved by all that one day she was sick, she called me up to the desk and said she had to go get her medicine down at Kenyon’s where she had board and room. I was to sit at the desk to keep order while she was gone.”
“Needless to say, the minute she left the room, every one jumped up, started to laugh and run around. I got their attention and told them if they thought anything of her, I was asking them to sit down and shut up and finish their study’s. Not for me but for her. They all settled down, she came back to a very orderly school. For years she never knew how I kept order. But years later we were talking. I told her it was their respect for her, not me, that made them do it. She said, that’s the nicest thing I’ve ever had said to me. We were very close friends all her life.
“The years went by very fast and I had my first job while still going to school. I cleaned the school room each day, sweep and dust. I also kept the fire which meant banking it at night and up about five in the morning to go down in time to put wood on the coals which started it for the day. Sometimes before I was taking care of the fire, I remember Bill Hill putting some twenty-two caliber shells in the stove. When they went off it blew the door off. No one got hurt. My brothers and Bill had to say in and had no noon hour. They would not tell who did it. This went on for days. Bill confessed to Dad but I don’t think the teacher ever found out who really did do it. The first thing I bought was a bike at Mable Cleveland’s auction, two dollars with my own money I earned.”
Next: dances and kitchen hops.