EASTERN STATE NORMAL SCHOOL ALUMNI
REUNITE AT WILSON MUSEUM

Snippets of the Past - gleaned by interviewer Sandra Dinsmore.

Mary M. Milner, Lucy P. Soper '33 and Ralph Beal '33

“It was like a big family . . . There was a camaraderie . . . We all knew and liked each other . . . . We learned social graces . . . We all sang . . . It was a fun three years . . . I just loved the school.” Those are just some of the things Eastern State Normal School [ESNS] graduates remember about their three years as students in Castine.

About forty alumni and alumnae, representing the classes of 1929, 1933, 1935, 1937, 1938, 1941, 1942, and 1943, gathered for a meeting and lunch on Saturday, June 29, at Castine’s Wilson Museum.

“We didn’t think we were going to be able to meet in Castine,” said ESNS newsletter editor Wayne Porter (‘43), of Brewer. Given the limited floor space at the museum, Porter said, “We didn’t think [the Museum staff] would be able to set up enough tables, but they did a wonderful job. We were so pleased.”

One of only ten or twelve boys in the entire ninety-student school, Porter recalled, “We all sang together. Music was a big thing. The first year I was there, Mrs. Wardwell, the music teacher, put on The Pirates of Penzance. The whole school: we were all in it.”

The Normal School comprised three buildings: Alumni Hall, now called Dismukes Hall; Richardson Hall, now known as Leavitt Hall; and the gym, now Captain Quick Hall. The tennis courts, between Richardson Hall and the superintendent’s house, were eventually razed for parking.

Class of 1935 Margaret H. Cormier, Alice and Roger Woodbury

Back in the 1940s, however, parking space was not the problem, but rather, the ratio of male to female students. “We had hardly enough boys to make up the athletic teams,” Porter said. “There were times when we had to highjack somebody, Shanghai somebody. At least [all the boys] got a chance to participate.”

Although he’d been on his high school track team and could streak down the court ahead of everybody, Porter said he didn’t have any basketball sense. He illustrated that statement by telling a story of his last year at ESNS, when his friend Brad Bunker, from Franklin, whom he described as a more moderate person, played guard with him on the team. Porter recalled the coach saying, “If I could just combine you two men, I’d have a good guard.”

Because of the war, Porter graduated with the class of ‘42 instead of ‘43 and said the last year the school was in operation — it had opened in 1867 — it housed both the maritime academy and the normal school. This meant the Normal School teams could commandeer maritime academy cadets who came not only from Maine but from Massachusetts and other states and from larger schools than most ESNS students.

Class of 1942 Myrtle C. Blodgett, Shirley P. Porter

Athletic teams notwithstanding, Porter and the other students feel they left the school well equipped to teach. The Normal School had what they called the Model School right in Alumni (Dismukes) Hall. The teaching school had three classrooms: one for sub-primary, first, and second grades; another for third, fourth, and fifth grade students; and yet another for grades six, seven, and eight. ESNS students had six weeks of each year for in-school teaching and nine weeks of practice teaching in nearby towns their senior year. Porter did his nine weeks at what was then the rural school in Orland. He got his provisional degree after two years at ESNS, but said he felt competent to teach. (After the war began, Porter and fellow student Omar Clukey virtually took over the model school classes they taught because their “tech” teacher, Mr. Robbins, was on the rationing board for the Town of Castine, which took most of his time. Nonetheless, Porter recalled the school as being “big on discipline,” and Miss Leslie, the elementary superintendent, checking in on them at the Model School.)

After the war, Porter graduated from the University of Maine, and became a secondary school principal (and math & science teacher and baseball coach, among other things) at schools in Maine, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. As a school administrator, he said, “I saw so many [young teachers] come out of college; they had their academics, but didn’t know how to teach.”

Class of 1941 Julia M. Gove, Malcolm Blodgett, Verna M. Dobson, Josephine H. Stover, Charlotte R. Wilson

Verna Mitchell Dobson (‘41) taught for 38 years and said, “I had to have gotten pretty good training: I never had any problems.” She trained in the rural Penobscot School (now being restored as part of the Penobscot Historical Society), did some substitute teaching in Rockland and Islesboro, taught eight grades in a one-room school on Cliff Island, then went on to teach in Westbrook and then Portland, where she and her husband, Gordon, still live.

Reunion Secretary and Treasurer Jody (Josephine) Hutchins Stover (‘41), of Orland, like the others, enjoyed her three years at Castine and had a rich teaching career. Among other things, she credits the school for teaching students the social graces. Gladys Milliken,” she said, “taught us how to set a table.”

Stover first taught professionally at the North Blue Hill School, where she taught all grades and all eleven children. Then she moved to Greenville, which she loved, and taught second and seventh grades. After she married and raised three children, she substituted, then taught all elementary grades in Orland and Bucksport for a number of years before spending two years at the University of Maine, getting her Master’s degree in Education. She then worked as an Elementary Guidance Counselor in Winterport and Newburgh for seven more years before retiring.

Alumni Association President Leah Graham Sample (‘43), on the other hand, taught for only a few years. She taught grades three, four, and five at the Adams School in Castine, in 1945 and 1946, before marrying and raising a family. “I loved the almost family feeling [at the Normal School],” she said. “It was so small: you knew everybody.”

She spoke highly of William Hall, principal of ESNS from 1920 until it closed in 1943, and said, “He was a wonderful, patriarchal figure. He took us on bird walks and camping trips.” More importantly for young teachers in training, she said, “He always expected more of us than we thought we had, and everyone was surprised when we came through with it.”

Margaret Hall Hook

Hall’s daughter, Margaret Hall Hook (not related to the Castine Halls and Hooks) expanded on why her father took students on bird walks. “There were more girls than boys,” she said; “they were going to rural areas with no entertainment; he wanted to give them another interest.”

Hall was very interested in sports, she said, and had started women’s basketball at Aroostook State Normal School, at Presque Isle, a practice he continued at Castine.”

“He had a wonderful, dry sense of humor,” his daughter said, and illustrated her point by recalling a hiking trip he and the students had taken on Islesboro. “My dad was passing out silverware for supper and said, ‘If you want a spoon, wait till the moon comes up.” On the other hand, she remembered the time he made a student go home because she was wearing bobby-socks, not the requisite stockings. The student got back at Hall. At the annual Christmas party, she gave him a pair of yellow bobby-socks.

Although Hall forbade many things on campus, such as smoking, Hook said, “He couldn’t criticize boys and girls going together because he met his wife, Letitia Hatch, from Islesboro, when they were in the same class at Normal School, in 1901.”

Hall loved canoeing and often included his students on his canoe trips. Hook, however, called her father “quite strict” and although she said, “He expected me to go to the Normal School,” she went against his wishes, getting her bachelor’s degree at the University of Maine and her Master’s degree in Library Science at Simmons, in Boston.

Class of 1943 Wayne Porter, Leah G. Sample, Miriam Bisbee, and Dorothea and Brad Bunker

On the other hand, Beatrice Leach Drinkwater (‘37), who was from Castine, longed to live in a dormitory at the Normal School and resented not being able to do so. She did attend the proms, though, and took part in other social events. As to the teaching part of college life, she said, “We got a lot of good suggestions for practice teaching. Mary Bills always wrote out comments, and that helped us. One thing sticks with me today," she said: “Dress appropriately.”

After raising three children, she taught for eighteen years in Bucksport.

Like Porter, John Roberts (‘37), attended the Normal School for only two years before transferring to Boston University, but he remembers the friendliness of all the people and that they all had a good work attitude. “Ermo Scott was a great teacher, an inspiration to me,” he said. “I followed his method, to a certain extent.” Roberts’s wife, Beatrice, added that the Normal School inspired patriotism in her husband.

Roberts started his teaching career in Milbridge, then spent thirty-four years teaching in Norway and Oxford Hill. In all, he taught for thirty-eight years.

Maxine Giberson (‘37), from Danforth, also remembers the friendliness of students and faculty and the quality of the practice teaching. She said each student had so many weeks teaching each of the eight primary school grades, and that a teacher would then evaluate the work done for each grade.

Giberson married a school superintendent. They moved many places in Maine and Massachusetts. She taught for thirty-four years.

Ashley Webster, of Lincoln, class of 1929 and the oldest reunion attendee, taught for thirty-nine years. He comes from a family of teachers. He, his wife, his sisters, son, and daughters have, as he said, “a hundred and fifty years in it.”

A native Castinian who lived off the neck at Morse’s Cove, he had gone to a rural school and had been quite timid before attending ESNS. The biggest thing he got out of going to the Normal School, he said, was the confidence he gained in speaking before the public. He was helped in this regard, while a student, by acting in plays and being a member of the Dramatic Club.

Class of 1929 Ashley Webster

The first year he taught (all eight grades), he said, “I learned more than the kids did.” He then taught in Trenton, Eastbrook, Plymouth, Brownfield, East Corinth, Newport, and Lincoln before becoming a full-time principal in 1945. He retired in 1954.

Although they’re retired, the Normal School graduates haven’t stopped teaching. For the past dozen or so years they’ve provided scholarships for three University of Maine seniors in Education. “We’ve donated over $26,000,” Porter, who’s chairman of the Scholarship Committee, said. “The endowment is worth $35,000.” Sample added, “It’s a nice legacy to leave.”

In the end, though, what drives a ninety-four-year-old man to attend his college reunion? Webster spoke for all those who made the effort when he said, “I just wanted to have one more contact.”