There may be no typical path for a child to become a professor, but it’s safe to say that Esther White had a vastly different experience in her youth than anyone currently serving on the Monmouth College faculty.
For starters, White’s childhood was in the 1920s, as many as seven decades earlier than that of Monmouth’s youngest current faculty members. The other difference was her very rural upbringing – the latter half of that time during the Great Depression – which she said is partially to credit for her long life.
“Money was not a thing of any evidence,” said White, an emerita professor of educational studies, who turns 100 on June 23. “We did have a garden, so my diet was primarily food from the garden, and the fruit trees and the grapevines. I didn’t know sugary drinks. It was a really good diet I grew up on. I don’t even remember my mother making a pan of fudge.”
She called her farm home in southeast Iowa “a wonderful place to grow up,” recalling several memories of animals from her youth, including having a pet squirrel and bottle-feeding baby lambs.
“Freedom and safety were mine as I searched the 700-acre woods that bordered our farm,” she said.
Those woods were a perfect location for summer picnics in the shade and other exploring adventures, and she also remembers making playhouses out of hay.
“I really thought I had it made,” she said of her early days. “You felt safe and secure.”
As White grew older, her capacity to help on the farm increased, and one of her favorite chores was helping her father with the harvest.
“Dad’s goal was to have all the corn shucked by Thanksgiving,” she said. “I got good enough at the task that I could shuck a row of corn in the time it took for him to shuck two.”
Lessons from school
Perhaps predictably, the future professor was eager to get her schooling started. She was more than ready by age 5, but there was no kindergarten then, so she worked on first-grade activities at home with her mother.
“I wished I could go to school,” she said. “The teachers had rings and necklaces and pretty new shoes. I thought they were wonderful. I thought that’s what I wanted – to have pretty things, too.”
The summer after completing her 12 years as a student, White took 10 weeks of classes at nearby Iowa Wesleyan College, which qualified her to be a teacher at a one-room schoolhouse. She went back each of the next four summers to take 10 more weeks of classes to get her full teacher’s certification.
White remembers one of the first lessons she learned as a teacher, as well as an important lesson she learned that she made sure to pass on to the teachers she eventually educated at Monmouth College.
“I remember struggling to learn to build a fire in the heating stove in the center of that one-room school,” she said. “I learned to stoke the fire before I left so that a few of the embers would still be smoldering the next day, making it easier when I went to build a fire again.”
The more children she taught, the more a broader lesson was reinforced.
“I learned not to give up on a kid,” she said. “Something positive about that kid will always come through.”
She also remembers an early lesson in how children learn about race. While serving as an administrator of a fairly large school district in Keokuk, Iowa, she oversaw five sections of first grade. One was taught by the district’s first black teacher.
“That caused a lot of chatter in our district,” she said. “One of our students went home for lunch that first day of school, and his mother asked him if his teacher was black. He laughed and said, ‘No, she isn’t black.’ He had to go back and look a little more carefully. I often wonder how long would it have taken that boy to discover his teacher was black if no one had said a word about it.”
Her time in Monmouth
After a long career as a teacher and administrator in Keokuk, White came to Monmouth in 1974 as a professor in the educational studies department. She intended to stay only two years, but she taught until 1988. She cited the relationships she built and the creation of Monmouth’s summer enrichment program, College For Kids, as reasons why she stayed.
Among the last students she taught was Sandra Pragas ’88, a Malaysian student who returned to her native country and eventually started her own kindergarten. Traveling to Malaysia to help Pragas get the school going was one of White’s career highlights.
White treasures relationships with family and friends, and among those friends are the people who live next door to her on either side. One is her longtime friend, Marilyn Van Hoozer. The other is Dale Unverferth, also a retired teacher.
“Dale is a gem and a jewel,” said White. “He goes to the store and gets things for Marilyn and me. Everything he does is out of the goodness of his heart, which is a wonderful quality.”
Unverferth’s example is related to one of the major life lessons that Esther White has learned over the course of the past century.
“Only as we make our love evident does it add to our journey,” she said.
***Report Courtesy of Monmouth College***
