Wed, Oct 7, 1942: busy as can be

“We missed you last week-end.  Kept thinking I would hear you come in but never did.  How are you getting along this week?

“As usual I'm busy as can be and hardly have time enough to sleep.  Last Friday finished my first month of school.”

-- Letter from my grandmother, Jessie Maybelle (Berger) Brown, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Sidney DeVere Brown, Winfield, Kans., Wednesday, October 7, 1942.  Both my grandmother and my father were starting back to school in the fall of 1942, he as a college student, she as a schoolteacher.  My father was starting his sophomore year of college at Southwestern College, a Methodist school thirty miles south of my grandparents’ farm.  My grandmother was teaching grade school in Bloomington, near the farm.  Before marrying, my grandmother had been a schoolteacher for nine years, starting at age 17.   She married my grandfather in 1923 at age 26, and quit teaching to help with farmwork and raise their three children: my father born in 1925, my aunt in 1928, and my uncle in 1933.  My grandmother began teaching again in 1940.