Velma: Twentieth-Century Student

I have spent more than a decade researching and writing and fact checking and editing, so you know I couldn’t just dive into French lessons from 1913 using my great-grandmother’s college textbook without looking some things up. Like, for example, the fact that she went to college during World War I.

I grew up one town over from Mansfield, so the university was always on my radar, even if I only visited it a handful of times. I was surprised to learn it had been founded as a seminary in 1857, but it quickly became a “normal,” or secular, school in 1862. In 1902, Mansfield started offering a three-year program like universities did instead of the two-year normal school program. In 1926, it was granted status to hand out college degrees, so in 1927 it became Mansfield State Teachers College.

That’s what my great-grandmother Velma Rose Smith was there for: a teaching degree. According to records I found on the internet, she graduated from the normal school in 1920. So she was attending school when my great-grandfather, Arnold, sent this postcard from Paris, where he was stationed in 1918.

On the back it reads,

We are not a terribly sentimental people.

Velma graduated with a degree in education either in 1926, which is what her 1999 obituary said, or in 1925, which is what I found on the internet. Either way, she was edcuated and certified to teach.

There are little things tucked into the book; Grandma Smith always saved things she found pretty. As I work through the lessons and find them, I’ll post them. In the meantime, it’s on to the first lessons in articles: definite and indefinite!