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mermaidcamp

Keeping current in wellness, in and out of the water

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Olga Scott Morse, Education Pioneer

June 20, 2013 — 1 Comment

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)

is my paternal grandmother
Richard Arden Morse (1920 – 2004)
son of Olga Fern Scott
Pamela Morse
I am the daughter of Richard Arden Morse

I am an Okie

May 21, 2013 — 1 Comment

I was born in Tulsa in 1951, and although I moved to Pennsylvania when I was 4, I visited Oklahoma many times in my childhood.  When the musical Oklahoma came out in 1955 I was thrilled and learned the words and music to sing ad infinitum.  I was the soundtrack of some of my best years. I identified with my Oklahoma birthplace which was reinforced by frequent visits, and visiting Tulsans at our home in Pittsburgh.  My parents hung out and had musical hootenannies with other petroleum engineer friends from Tulsa who had come to PA like my dad, to specialize in fracking for Gulf Oil.  They brought much of their Okie lifestyle with them including Woody Guthrie, hickory chips and barbecue.

I went to Tulsa and drove all over the state a few years ago on my first  ancestry discovery trip.  I did feel very at home, although perhaps not in political alignment with the population. I particularly loved the grapes at the farmers market that reminded me of the grapes my grandpa grew when I was very young.  While driving with my uncle to Bartlesville I asked as a joke what we do in case of a twister.  He said we jump out of the car and hide in a drainage culvert.  I started noticing how infrequently these culverts were there on the side of the road, and started having thoughts of vulnerability.  I imagined hustling my fairly nimble but old uncle out of the car and into the ditch to save our lives and I just did not like that idea at all. I made it back and forth across Kansas and Oklahoma without incident, but did find graves and documents from my ancestors who lived through the dust bowl. I respect and admire those Boomer Sooners and pioneer petro peeps who formed the history of the Cherokee Strip and my family tree.  I am sad that my fellow Okies are suffering so much natural disaster and destruction in their lives.  Although I still feel the pride of being from Oklahoma, I know I could not handle living with the terror of tornadoes in my territory.  I have adjusted to wildfires and floods here in Arizona as my natural disasters of choice. I wish the state of my birth a full and speedy recovery.