Adobe Days/Chapter 13
Chapter XIII
School Days
My education began the day I was born, for I am told that, after a somewhat precipitous and unceremonious arrival, my father took me about the room to see the pictures on the wall—sundry chromos and steel engravings, which I am said to have observed with intelligence and pleasure. Having been intimately acquainted with several normal infants, I doubt, however, both observation and pleasure. Perhaps that early exposure to art was what determined my life-long interest in it, and in the joys of seeing. Those old-fashioned pictures may have presented to my inexperienced eye no more confused an image than do the latest post-impressionist interpretations of essential form or the soul of things to my trained sight.
After this introduction to the graphic arts I met poetry—familiar hymns and Mother Goose. I knew the ten little Indians who by a series of gruesome accidents were reduced to none, Prudy, Sanford and Merton whom I loathed, Pocahontas and Robinson Crusoe. I still possess a number of books that date far back in my life, among them Mary Mapes Dodge’s Rhymes and Jingles and Whittier’s Child Life. The only things my father ever read aloud to me were poems, usually out of the big green and gold House hold Book of Poetry. Aunt Martha read us Helen’s Babies, to my delight.
I was reading at four. I have “Rewards of Merit,” small cards with gay pictures given me at the end of each week when I had been a good little girl and made proper progress in my reading lessons. And for my fifth birthday my father printed in red ink a foolscap sheet of words for me to learn to spell, five columns beginning with words of two letters and running up to six letters each. I must have been greatly pleased with my present for I remember it yet so happily. A letter written by my mother at this time says that I was insatiable in my demand for stories to be told to me and for books to be read.
My first school was a private one in First Street between Spring and Main in Los Angeles after I was seven. I remember very little about it. My career there was ended by the long sickness when father told me about his early trips to California. The next school was supposed to be very select, Miss Carle’s, over on Olive Street near Second in the same house with Miss Stem, my Adventist music teacher, who used to tell me the world was about to end, but who could give no satisfactory answer to my contention that in that case I ought to be having harp lessons instead of piano. The school numbered ten children and was conducted in Miss Carle’s bedroom, apparently, for in one corner stood a marvellous, high feather-bed; once when I carelessly stood on a chair to reach the top of the black-board, she in anger tossed me across the room to this bed, where I disappeared in its feathery depths. Having acquired a little knowledge and considerable whooping-cough, this school was also consigned to my past.
The Los Angeles Academy on Main Street, between Third and Fourth, was my next educational resort. This was on the lot adjoining the famous old round-house, or better, fourteen-sided house,—each of whose sides was labelled with the name of one of the thirteen original states and California. It had been for many years a popular resort and beer garden called “The Garden of Eden.” But its days of glory were past, and the marble Adam and Eve who had adorned it were gone; no flaming sword was visible, but there was a formidable cactus hedge on the Spring Street side which may have deterred them from return. There was vacant land on the east side of Main Street opposite the school, where one of the city zanjas ran beside a row of willows at the foot of a little hill. Playing here one noon I attempted to wade and was unceremoniously swept from my feet and sent sailing down the flume. I suppose I learned something at this school, but I know that I have always suffered from lack of drill in plain addition and subtraction, so I think I shall have to blame the Los Angeles Academy for hampering me in calculus and other of the higher reaches of mathematics.
When I was ten I was somewhat desperately and gingerly consigned to the public schools, where I would much better have been from the beginning. I started in the fifth grade under Mrs. Ella Enderlein, later a newspaper woman well known in the city. I had the good fortune to have both sixth and seventh grade work with Mrs. C. G. Du Bois, a rare teacher, who remained in the school system for many, many years, and will be lovingly remembered by numerous men and women of Los Angeles who were also once the boys and girls of this city. When I knew her she wore six little grey curls hanging at the back of her head, and she had the merriest blue eyes,—we learned our lessons well for her. There was a strange principal who used to walk about the halls arrayed like Solomon in all his glory. He wore slippers and a dressing gown of oriental patterns and coloring, trimmed with a sapphire blue. Perhaps his style of dress had something to do with his disappearance from our view. His successor was an excellent teacher, I know, for he taught me in the eighth grade; however he had a bad temper and once threw an eraser at one of the girls and chased a boy up and down the aisles and over our desks in a vain attempt to thrash him.
Mrs. Bradfield was art teacher for all the schools in the city and gave me my first lessons. As I had something of a gift for drawing I was allowed on all possible public occasions to decorate the blackboards with colored chalk pictures and designs, often Kate Greenaway children, or sun-flowers after Oscar Wilde.
My four years of grammar school were passed in the first high school building, located on Pound Cake Hill, about where the upper story of the County Court House now is. When the site was wanted by the men-folk of the town, the school building was moved on a mighty trestle across Temple Street and over to California Street and the hill itself was decapitated.
When I was ready for high school I went down to the new grammar school building at Sixth Street which occupied the Mercantile Place property between Spring and Broadway. I daily walked along a Broadway of cottages and gardens and occasional churches. Often I picked a flower or a Chinese orange from Aunt Margaret’s yard at Second Street; and, as I passed, I looked down the lovely Third Street, shaded by large pepper trees, to a cottage covered by an enormous rose bush.
The Los Angeles High School was temporarily accommodated in four rooms and an office, while the new building up next the old graveyard on North Hill Street, was being constructed. It is said that for several years the high school children ate their noon lunches sitting on tombs and cemetery curbs. In my day there were fewer than two hundred students. The course was not unlike the simpler ones of today, but there were not so many electives and none of the manual and technical classes. In the ninth grade I had Latin, Rhetoric, Algebra, Physical Geography, and Ancient History; and in the tenth, Latin, Geometry, English and English History,—not so very different from the present college preparatory, is it?
Mrs. Bradfield taught drawing in the high school as well as in the grades. It was under her that Guy Rose got his first art lessons. Music also had a special teacher and under Prof. Kent we sang lustily— among other things “We are the gay students of fair Salamanca.” His high silk hat, his close fitting Prince Albert coat, his waxed moustache, his smile, and tripping steps were very entertaining to the children.
At this time it was determined to send me north to school for a change of climate. Oakland at that time was a center of private schools and academies. I went to Field Seminary, long since extinct. The life in a well-governed boarding school was something new to me. I, who had ranged freely, must take my daily exercise in a regulated walk, the girls going two by two up and down the city streets. It was surprising how soon this habit affected my point of view. Once, after due deliberation and considering of my record, recommendations, and pedigree, I was allowed to walk alone around the corner—no street was to be crossed—to take dinner with my cousins, the Ben Flint family. It is a wonder I did not crawl through the paling fence where the back yards met, for such was the effect of the constant mass movements that when I stepped alone out of the gate into the peaceful street I felt as embarrassed as if I had shed my garments, along with the protecting phalanx of pupils and guarding teacher.
On Thursdays I was excused from exercise to take a bath. The rule of the clock was rigid, and when it said four o’clock on Thursday I must be ready to enter and bathe, or go forever unbathed. What a smashing of precedent! But I suppose one tub could not accommodate over forty girls on Saturday night, the correct American bath night.
The actual school work was a delight, with glimpses into new fields: chemistry, where we saw samples of aluminum, a metal which might some day become very useful; geology, with a long trip on the street car miles and miles into the country to the State University at Berkeley, where Professor Le Conte told us most interesting things—geology, gently tuned by Professor Thomas Heaton to meet the exigencies of Mosaic “days of creation,” and yet opening the mind to questionings. There was also Cicero and an introduction into the German language and English literature. I even read the whole of Paradise Lost. Then, bad eyes, and a verdict of never any more school, not even sight enough for sewing! But oculists don’t know everything always.
And so I came home. In the house were many books,—always had been so long as I could remember. The rigid Maine rule of semi-annual house-cleaning held sway, and it was often my task to take out, beat, dust and replace all the volumes in the capacious bookcases. There were essays, histories, biographies: sets of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Hawthorne, Scott, besides scattered novels; Shakespeare was there and a few other dramatists, all the standard poets, Cervantes and Plutarch. These were not only dusted, but read to a great or less extent.
Harper’s Magazine, with its buff cover adorned with cupids, cornucopias, fruits and flowers, was a regular visitor, as was the Century later. I recall the laughter of a family reading of Frank Stockton’s The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine. The Congre gationalist and The Pacific provided Sunday reading for father, along with his Bagster’s Bible. He once pointed out to me mildly that the varying accounts of the Hebrew historical events did not “jibe.” Several missionary magazines gave knowledge of life in far parts of the world. Littell’s Living Age came for several years, and, being bound, was at least handled semi-annually.
The tri-weekly New York Tribune and Harper’s Weekly (until it turned mug-wump) brought news out of the East to supplement what two daily papers afforded. I think father knew where every raw material in the world was produced and where it was manufactured. He used to “poke fun” at me as an educated woman, after I returned from college, because I could not name, characterize and assign to his state every United States Senator.
I had the advantage of a home where good English was spoken, where one was expected to know how to spell correctly and write grammatically, where an interest was taken in large and wide questions, and where everyone found his chief pleasure and amusement in reading. Rather a bad environment in which to find oneself condemned to useless eyes!
Los Angeles did not in those days offer, naturally, the same opportunities in art, theater, and music that the East did, but I saw Booth and Barrett in Julius Caesar and I heard Adelina Patti.
When my aunt came to our home she brought with her about a hundred photographic copies of the world’s famous paintings and pictures of cathedrals and statuary. On many a Sunday afternoon I pored over these until the names of Ralphael, da Vinci, Murillo, Phidias became as familiar as Longfellow or Scott.
As was customary, a faithful attempt extending over many years, was made to make a musician out of me. It failed. I was eye-minded. That exposure to art on my natal day had determined my tastes.
Vacations, the most welcome part of the school year, were spent, with the exception of one summer in the East, for the most part at the Cerritos. As the resort grew at Long Beach and we young folks attained age we passed many hours on the sand and in the breakers. Then, when I was eighteen, I had my first experience of camp life at Avalon, just established at Catalina. I learned to swim and dive, to tramp and sleep on the ground. For three summers we did this while the island was yet primitive and uncrowded.