Olga Scott Morse, Education Pioneer

June 20, 2013 — college, education, Oklahoma, teacher

My grandmother, Olga Scott Morse, was a teacher of business skills. She graduated with her masters in education after she had four kids. She left them at home on the oil lease with their dad during the week to attend classes at Oklahoma State University. I believe that in the 1930s this was a bold feminist move. After graduation from OSU she taught typing and shorthand at a junior college near their home in Tonkawa,OK. Learning to type was a bold femenist move, believe it or not.  Her students learned shorthand and typing and other current secretarial skills.  The school to day is called Northern Oklahoma College.  I stopped at the campus when I went to Oklahoma on an ancestry hunt a few years ago.  I found her name in an old yearbook in the library, which was fun.  I also looked through a lot of photos from the history of the school, where my dad and his brothers were students, but I did not find them. I walked around on campus, taking a break in my drive.   Later, I found a picture of her with her students in the 1930’s in front of the  central building at my uncle’s house in Wichita.  I easily recognized the building since I had just been there.

Her mother, Sarah Helena Byrne, was a teacher and her great-grandfather , Amos Nichols,was also.  My father was a university professor.  The teacher archetype is all over my father’s family. I wonder if this is a DNA situation or all the reading and discipline that teachers represent.  She was a farmer when I met her, having long since retired, but I remember her typewriter on the farm that had black keys..no letters.  She could wail on that thing, but she had little reason to to so.  I asked her to because I liked to watch her do it. She was a woman of many skills and talents, including flower and vegetable gardening.  Most of the fruits and vegetables we ate in the winter in Pittsburgh were grown on my grandparents’ farm in Arkansas and frozen. I picture her in a sun bonnet, like all her friends wore, on the farm.  Visiting the college where she taught before I was born was a really cool experience that showed me a part of her I never knew.  For her day and place she was super highly educated and accomplished.

Olga Fern Scott (1897 – 1968)