Diane Drufenbrock:
CLASS OF 1944
Stanley Hall Elementary SchoolClass of 1944
Evansville, IN
Reitz Memorial High SchoolClass of 1948
Evansville, IN
Diane's Story
This year I am celebrating 60 years as a School Sister of St. Francis. I taught Mathematics, Physics, Computer Science and Freshman Studies at St. Mary-of-the-Woods College for 18 years before my retirement from teaching in 1999. For ten years I have been in service at Sophia House, a center for spirituality and transformation in Milwaukee.
I am enjoying my eighth decade of life. An auto accident in 2005 and replacement of an arthritic knee in January of 2009 have helped me look at life more slowly and take time to smell the flowers.
Literally, I live just across the street from the famous Mitchell Park Domes. The plant conservatory is free every Monday to Milwaukee County residents. Often I visit for an hour or two just to soak up the tropic, desert and floral environments.
I do not know if any of my class mates from Stanley Hall (Chandler School) remember me. I lived until I was eight years old on Grand and Walnut. Usually I could walk to school. Often I visited the East Side Library and Bayard Park.
The gymnasium, kindergarten, the first three grades and an auditorium were in the new building. Miss Hall was my first grade teacher. I spent three semesters in kindergarten, probably because of missing school for childhood diseases and a misunderstanding between my mother and the administration. So I spent ten years in grade school because I flunked kindergarten.
During the summer after finishing 3B in the new building we moved to Ravenswood Drive. Dad drove me to school in his White Plumbing truck or I walked the mile to school. When I was ten I got a bicycle for Christm...Expand for more
as. After that I rode the bicycle to school and to almost everywhere else in Evansville.
Grades 3A on up to 8A were in the "big kids" building. We had homerooms and moved around to classes in English, Arithmetic, History, Science and Music. I rece1ved a very good education at Stanley Hall.
I remember most the jitney dinners with baked beans and hot dogs about once a month. We gathered on the stairs and around the balcony of the huge central lobby. All the classrooms and homerooms on both floors opened to the inner space.
We sat in big single unit desks, screwed tightly in long rows. Each desk had an inkwell and a favorite boy's trick was to dip the pigtail of the girl in front of him into the inkwell. We learned to write cursively using stick pens with removable points, taking ink from the inkwells. It was a messy work!
The teacher I remember best was Miss Mellon. I had her for arithmetic and homeroom in fourth and sixth grades. We used the Strayer-Upton arithmetic books. Miss Mellon had long division cards that had the answers coded for easy correction on her part.
Reading class before fifth grade was an absolute bore. I had learned to read two or three years earlier at the local library. In class we were not to read ahead, but listen intently as each student took a turn roughing it through a sentence or two. Woe be to the pupil who did not have the place when called upon to read.
We were the last group at Stanley Hall to go through on the "mid-year" plan. I left in 1943, half way through eighth grade to go to St. Benedict's Grade School. I graduated there in 1944.
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