If you really want to learn about what someone was like in their younger days, read their high-school yearbooks. I recently read through my mother’s and learned there was a great deal about her I didn’t know.
My mom, Ann (VanDunk) Pfaff, was born in 1940. She grew up in New Amsterdam, Wisconsin, which is just 4 miles west of the city of Holmen, Wisconsin, where she went to school. She started first grade at the age of 6.
“There wasn’t such a thing as kindergarten back in those days,” Mom said. “There were only four girls in my class and I was the only farm girl; the rest lived in town. I guess you could say I was kind of a tomboy.”
Her two siblings, Gordon and Evelyn, who were 9 and 10 years older, would drive her to school every day. After they graduated she rode the bus.
Her family didn’t have a lot of money but she said she had everything she needed and she was happy.
“I’d wear skirts and blouses to school that my mom made,” she said. “One summer I picked green beans and made enough money to buy material so Mom could make me a new skirt. The material cost only 12 cents.”
I learned math was one of my mom’s favorite subjects in school. She was so good at it the high school principal, who was also her math teacher, asked her and another girl in her class to collect lunch money each day and then count it during noon hour.
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