Growing Up in Williamsport, Ohio

Mrs. Ida Ware
 
Mrs. Ware was my Home Economics, English and Latin teacher. She was locally acclaimed and a good teacher. I still use everything she taught me on a daily basis. I had trouble sewing bias tape on a chicken potholder on the sewing machine. I told her that the more I sewed the worse it got. She had mercy on me and told me that I could clean the Home Economic classroom windows instead. : )
 
She did such a good job of teaching English that I took a scholarship test at Ohio State and got a certificate for first place in Pickaway County. That might be hard to believe since you see my errors in these blogs.
 
She introduced me to some of my favorite poets, Rudyard Kipling, James Whitcomb Riley and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Every time I think of the poem “The Rainy Day” by Longfellow, I think of looking out of the classroom basement window of the school because it had the “vine still clings to the moldering wall” on the outside.
 
Her Latin class provided me with the foundation for all of the languages that I would learn in my lifetime….Spanish, Portuguese and New Testament Greek.
 
Mrs. Ware had sugar diabetes and when the classroom got warm in the afternoons, she often dozed off. One afternoon, she asked me to read. I came across a word that I didn’t know and read “spulcher” for the word sepulchre. She snapped out of her nap and said, “Whaaaat?”.

©Marilyn Francis Ferguson 2021
Photography/graphics by Michele Ferguson Schuck