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| Nebraska State Normal School at Peru, circa 1900 |
I thought
immediately of Alexander J. Stoddard, son of a Scottish farmer who immigrated
to the U.S. in 1848 at the age of two.
The family settled in southeastern Nebraska, preceding the homesteaders. The father married twice and fathered nine
children.
Several of
his children grew up to become teachers, including young Alexander. But it looks like Alexander was the only one
who left Nebraska. He went on to pursue
a brilliant career in public education that carried him east and west across 35
years.
The drama of
the Plains – the floods, the droughts, the farming life – that’s what he set
out to leave behind.
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| Alexander J. Stoddard Nebraska State Normal School at Peru 191o yearbook |
He started
on that path at the Nebraska State Normal School at Peru, a teacher training
school. Normal schools proliferated in
the U.S. after the Civil War. By 1909, when 20-year old Alexander arrived at
the hilltop campus, the demand for teachers had been rising steeply since the
turn of the century. Anywhere that you
could point to in the country was in need of educators.
At Peru,
Alexander became president of his class.
(He also learned to play tennis on the lawn courts.) After two years, he headed off to the
University of Nebraska at Lincoln where he received a B.A. In 1917, while skirmishing with the Nebraska
draft examiners, he married his childhood sweetheart, Sadie Gillan. They would have two children.
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| Southeastern Nebraska Stoddard was born and grew up in Auburn; attended normal school in Peru; taught school in Beatrice while in school at Peru; and received his B.A. from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. The dotted blue line at the right marks the Missouri River. |
As Alexander
continued his education, the family headed east where he earned a master’s
degree in educational administration at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Then he
soared; advancing from superintendent of schools in the suburban village of
Bronxville, N. Y., to Schenectady, Providence, Denver, Philadelphia, and,
finally, Los Angeles. He also led
several prestigious national educational organizations.
Alexander
spent 65 of his 76 years in the twentieth century. The sweep of his life calls for an
exclamation, or at least a smile: the
same man who traveled by horseback from Peru State College to the city of Beatrice,
Nebraska, where he taught school to help put himself through school, also fiercely
advocated educational television when it came on the scene during the 1950s.
He was a
modern man.
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| Alexander J. Stoddard, 1946 |
Nevertheless,
nineteenth-century realities influenced his life. The floods that have devastated Peru and
other towns in southeast Nebraska echo the vagaries of the weather that would
have tormented his father. Not to
mention the Panic of 1893.
Inevitably, Alexander
and many of his peers left the Plains. They did not want to live the farmer’s
life, and the lure of the city was hard to fend off. Perhaps there are numbers
in a book somewhere, but I will guess that hundreds of them became very fine
teachers.
In this spring
of 2019, Peru State College still overlooks the Missouri River, its campus
scattered with oak trees and old brick buildings. A four-year college with an online extension
program, it nods to its earlier incarnation with a School of Education.
Now it’s back in business as the flood waters recede, although irreparable damage has been inflicted on the homes, farms, and roads of southeastern Nebraska.
Now it’s back in business as the flood waters recede, although irreparable damage has been inflicted on the homes, farms, and roads of southeastern Nebraska.
https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2019/04/young-man-of-nebraska-alexander-j.html
