The Missed Graduation

Friday, August 30, 1918, saw a high temperature of 101 degrees Fahrenheit in Oklahoma. The next month of September was designated in Oklahoma as the month that broke the decade-long drought in Oklahoma according to https://climate.ok.gov. The sun set around 8 p.m. that day. The Spanish Flu had entered the United States in early 1918 and was stealthily encroaching on the healthy young.

Grandma in her later teen
years. She mischievously
cut her braids off as a kid
and her mother in
exasperation said, "I hope
your hair never grows back."
and it didn't. Only my mother
could roll Grandma's hair so
she could style it. According
to Grandma, it had just
enough natural curl to be
difficult to manage. Of
course in the early 1900s,
hair products were few.

           Gladys Vivian Rainey, a determined young woman who had recently turned 18, lived on the southwestern side of the Bend. She and her family lived "near the Ralph Dooley place" in the early 20th century. She used that explanation since she was sure we girls knew the location of where Ralph, Sissy, and their boys lived.

Grandma, Gladys Rainey Smith, often said she went through the eighth grade four times. Upon perusing this 105-year-old-program, I think I understood a little better what she meant. Grandma was a voracious learner. Her teacher, Alta Cales, must have challenged and encouraged Grandma to set goals to reach each school term during her years of study at the original Woodland School on the west side of the Bend (The school did not have enough students to offer high school courses.). In April, Grandma had taken the battery of tests to meet the standard for graduation.

The Osage County Eighth Grade Commencement was scheduled for Friday, August 30, 1918. Out of the 84 graduates, Grandma must have scored second highest on the April test and was honored as the salutatorian and was listed on the program to give the salutatory address. But sadly, Grandma did not get to attend this important milestone in her young life.

This is the front and back of the 105-year-old program that has been preserved in Grandma's
keepsakes. The inner two pages listed the 84 graduating students.

So why did Grandma not participate in the graduation and receive the diploma she, the over-achiever, had worked so hard to earn? For starters, living 50 miles away from Pawhuska, the Osage County seat, sealed the deal of not participating. My father related it took a half day to get to Fairfax from the Gates place on the northwest side of the Bend. A Pawhuska trip would require three times as much time.* From family stories told, the Rainey family would have still been using a horse-drawn buggy for transportation. The August heat and the late evening start of the graduation exercises also must have made the trip an impossible event.

I never remember Grandma lamenting being unable to attend, participate as the salutatorian, and receive her diploma. I am sure she fought disappointment. Part of life in those pioneer days of the Bend were meeting letdowns head on, allowing them to glance off, and continue persevering with living life. Grandma did maximize her educational achievement. By the summer of 1919, she was enrolled at Oklahoma A & M in a summer training to earn a one-year teaching certificate upon completion of the teacher training.

One of the Life Principles to Live By by Dr. Charles F. Stanley deals with disappointments. The principle is Disappointments are inevitable, discouragement is a choice. This quote provides a truth to live by and is effective whether the disappointment is a minor one or major one.

Dealing with disappointments has always required doing hard things. As I checked cattle the very day this blog post was scheduled to post, I reflected on our upcoming Sunday School lesson from Lamentations, a collection of laments written to express the anguish, pain and sorrow of the destructive fall of Jerusalem. Yet in the middle of the third lament, Jeremiah, the godly prophet, wrote in chapter 3, verse 27, It is good for a man to bear the yoke in his youth.  

Adam Clarke, a Wesleyan Methodist theologian of Northern Ireland, spanned the 17th and 18th centuries with his fruitful ministry. In his Bible commentary, he penned these words about Jeremiah's verse pertaining to doing "hard things" in one's youth, Early habits, when good, are invaluable. Early discipline is equally so. He who has not got under wholesome restraint in youth will never make a useful man, a good man, nor a happy man.

Grandma, as a young girl, had learned to do hard things from manual labor in the field during the summer with her father and siblings to canning in the summer months with her mother without air conditioning or even fans. Hard work taught the importance of delayed gratification and a less self-centered attitude. Both of these precepts enable us to handle disappointment from the youngest to the oldest. How important that adults at any age hold onto these principles and pass them along to another generation!

*Interestingly, most couples from the Bend in that era that I have researched were married in Pawnee, the county seat of Pawnee County, only half the distance of Pawhuska.