RW Keys and Son - Resource Bank

You don’t put your arm around
one kid until you can put it
around all of them.
summer session up at “the Normal” to prepare her
for teaching, and at age 19 she set out to become the
new schoolmarm at Schandelmeier School on Cherry
Valley Road, where she boarded with the Germanspeaking
family next door.
Like her mother, Yvonne fi rst taught in a one-room
schoolhouse, but her path to the profession was
a little different. By the time Yvonne attended
Northern in the late 1940s, it had become Northern
Illinois State Teacher’s College and was bustling
with “G.I. Joes.” She majored in home economics,
but by graduation time she was still unsure what
career she wanted to pursue. Her mother gently
suggested teaching, and Yvonne, age 20, took the
opening at Love School on Barber Greene Road. “I
stayed two years, ’51-’52, and in those two years I
had 96 kids,” she recalls. They were mostly children
of itinerant families who would come up from the
South, earn money, and go back home, but Yvonne
remembers some of them very vividly: “I had one
little guy whose dad gave him a glass of beer every
day—six years old.”
Conditions at Love were hardly lovely, and Yvonne
would often come home at the end of a day and pour
her frustrations out to her mother. “I really had a
mess there,” Yvonne admits, “but I had a couple of
little ones who were just sweethearts, and I would
talk about them. My mother would look at me and
say, ‘You don’t put your arm around one kid until
you can put it around all of them.’ That advice
Yvonne’s mother, Virginia Nelson, with her students in front of a one-room schoolhouse.