Smoky Valley Historical Association Oral Histories: Gladys Peterson (March 13, 1986)

Описание: "A teacher is a person with a touch of immortality."
Today's #FlashbackFriday oral history series today takes us into the history of education and the long-reaching effect teachers have in this March 13, 1986, interview with Gladys Peterson.

Clarice Eckstrom - one of Peterson's former students - conducts the interview.
Gladys was born Feb. 8, 1904, just eight days before the founder of Bethany College - Dr. Carl Swensson - died unexpectedly, so education was intertwined with her life from her earliest days. There's an early picture of her at age 3, appearing to be play-teaching out of a book.
Her parents were not educated beyond the 8th grade, so they both encouraged more education in their children and planted seeds with Gladys for her to be a teacher.
Right out of high school, Gladys was teaching at the one-room "Bean School" and then at her own hometown school in Freemount, meaning she ended up being teacher to her own siblings.
A 1931 graduate from Bethany College, later she became the Director of Elementary Education at Luther Academy - a junior college in Nebraska.
She then returned to Bethany as the education department chair for 13 years, where she established the elementary education degree at the college. At the time, certification requirements were changing so that teachers needed a college degree to continue, even though they already had decades experience. This meant she helped many teachers - some in their 50s - to walk across the stage with a college degree for the first time.
She even had a role in establishing the Lindsborg Community Library in the 1960s, as she tried to ensure students in the education department at the college had access to children's books that were essential staples in elementary school.

This is just one part of an ambitious set of oral history recordings under the direction of Elston Flohr, who was a member of the association's Board of Directors and part of the faculty of the Department of English, Theater and Speech at Bethany College. Those interviews are part of the museum archive collection, and there are about 30 Beta and VHS cassette recordings in the series, plus audio cassette tapes.
They were created out of a project by the Smoky Valley Historical Association - Kansas and are presented here with permission of the association.

Digitization of these videos was made possible with a small Nutt grant from the McPherson County Community Foundation.

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