I used to think that, in my family, my mom and dad were the first generation to go to college.
But recently I discovered that this is not the case. Let me tell you Edna Johnson’s education story.
Edna
was my dad’s mom. She was born and grew up in Princeton, Illinois, and in 1919
she graduated from Princeton High School. She didn’t seem to have immediate
plans for her future. According to the 1920 U.S. Census, six months after
graduation, she was still living at home with her parents and three sisters.
She did not have a job. However, her oldest sister Myrtle was a teacher and her
second oldest sister Laura was a stenographer at a dry goods store. They sound
like good role models for being a working woman!
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| 1920 U.S. Census for Princeton, Bureau County, Illinois |
The social bits in the newspaper reported a few of Edna’s doings after graduation. She sang at a church funeral in December of 1919 and a couple more in early 1920. She also hosted a meeting of The Loyal Helpers, a church group. What the papers don’t say is whether Edna was looking for a job, or if she had any part time jobs. The year after Edna graduated from high school is a bit of a mystery.
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| 26 November 1920 Princeton Bureau County Tribune, p. 12 |
In 1920 Edna was a college student!
Augustana College and Theological Seminary was in Rock Island, Illinois, 70 miles west of Princeton. In addition to the usual college departments Augustana also had a “Commercial Department,” which offered two options for study: the Bookkeeping course and the Stenography course. Each course took a year (36 weeks) and cost $100 each. If Edna took both of these courses, as the college catalog encouraged students to do, she would have received her certificate/graduated in 1922.
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Here is Edna in the 1922 Augustana yearbook, the “Rockety-I,” one of 29 students in the Commercial Department that year.
How did Edna end up at Augustana? Did she have a penchant for numbers or a head for business? Did she want to fill her time, or did she feel the need to contribute to the family financially? Did she want more than singing at funerals and hosting church groups?
And what exactly were her college days like? Did she participate in campus activities? Was she a good student? Did she make friends at Augustana? Where did she live?
These are questions that I may never answer.
What
I do know is, in the fall of 1922, the Princeton newspaper starts reporting Edna’s activities in the church again. She sings at funerals and is involved with the Luther League.
She travels and visits her younger sister Evelyn who is now a student nurse in
Chicago. In 1923 sister Myrtle gets married; in 1924 Laura marries and the
following year youngest sister Evelyn ties the knot. Edna’s father Theodore
passes away in 1928. By the end of the decade Edna and her mother are alone in
the house on West Putnam in Princeton. The 1920s must have been a hard decade for Edna.
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| 1929 Princeton City Directory |
I don't know when Edna first reaped the benefits of her commercial education at Augustana, but this city directory shows her employed as a bookkeeper for a bank in 1929. I sure wish I could have a conversation with her about what it was like to work in a bank when the stock market crashed in the fall of that year!
Edna
worked at the bank until she married Harry Peterson, my grandfather (who, incidentally,
never graduated from high school). Edna’s time at Augustana was a surprise to me,
but it shouldn’t have been. My dad Stan, Edna’s son, attended Augustana and met
his future wife, my mom Sarah. Although none of Stan and Sarah’s children went
to Augustana, one grandson did.
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| Old Main, Augustana College May, 2022 |
Here’s to Augustana College, for all the ways it has educated our family!
