Mabel Cunningham was born on a farm, she became a schoolteacher, a wife, a mother, a volunteer. This description, which is only a little more concise than what appears in the obituaries of most women, doesn't begin to reveal the profound aspirations and great obstacles that shaped her life.
     Mabel's deep religious vocation was not welcomed by her family. Nevertheless, she pursued her calling and become a missionary, only to be rejected by her church when she became afflicted with epilepsy. Fiercely determined not to be dependent on her parents, she became an itinerant schoolteacher, and for thirty-four years struggled against unrelenting and merciless prejudice and ignorance in the school system.
     Her journey (a more accurate word would be pilgrimage) is dense with twists and turns, sudden reversals of fortune, tests and trials. I often imagine her traveling alone through the western states in the roaring Twenties, the Great Depression and the pre-war Thirties and Forties, a solo woman moving from town to town, state to state, lugging all her belongings in a few suitcases, catching a bus to a small rural village in Kansas or a small mining town high in the mountains of Colorado or California, or going by herself to the World's Fair in San Francisco for a bit of vacation and to feed her insatiable craving for knowledge.

MABEL Z. CUNNINGHAM
Curriculum Vitae

In 1934, two years after I lost the sight in my left eye, the epilepsy got hold of me. The doctor who diagnosed my trouble gave me this advice: “Mabel, the best thing you can do is stay home and raise chickens. That way you can kick up your heels any time you have to.”
     My folks took me home to the farm. I crawled into bed and lay there, wanting to die. I was twenty-six years old. I thought no man would ever marry me. I knew I would never have a normal life. People were afraid of epileptics. My own family was ashamed of me, which made me feel ashamed of myself. “What in the world have I done,” I kept asking myself, “that God has gone and done this to me?”
     I remember a day when I walked out alone to the west pasture and sat down. The idea of staying home and living off my parents was unbearable. My true ambition was to be a missionary. I felt I had been called, and I had scrubbed floors and baked bread at nights for four years to pay for my tuition and books at the Kansas City Training School for Missionaries and Deaconesses. Despite the blindness, I had graduated with my class, and I was expecting to do religious work for the rest of my life. But I was honest and admitted to the church board that I had epilepsy, and then they wouldn’t have me.
     I asked myself: What in the world am I going to do? I had all that education. Somehow I had to keep myself. At last I made up my mind that I would teach school. I said out loud, “There’s forty-eight states.” That’s how many there were then. “Even if I’m sick and have to change jobs and states every year, maybe I can teach thirty more years and save enough money to retire on.”
     That’s what I did. I became something like an itinerant teacher. Now listen, that epilepsy was a sword of Damocles hanging over my head. I never knew when I might have one of those, whether it would come on me in the daytime or during the night. In the 1930s and ‘40s, if a school board found out you were epileptic, they wouldn’t give you the job. No state would hire you. Teachers didn’t have tenure. If I had a seizure, the school board just got rid of me. Some people thought an epileptic would lose control and maybe do something they shouldn’t. Or that the children might see a fit and be scared.
     The Union School was only three miles from the farm. I got a job there, and I lived with my folks. In the little one-room country schools, the teacher was always the janitor too. Every morning at five o’clock I got up and walked to school because I had to be there before eight to build the fires and warm up the building. Then I taught all the grades, and after school I cleaned the blackboards, swept the floor and walked home.
     For part of that first winter the snow was so heavy I couldn’t walk to school and I boarded for two weeks with a family we knew well, Mr. and Mrs. Prescott. They charged two dollars and a half a week for a room that had a bed and a washbasin and a slopjar. My brother Martin had been engaged to one of the Prescott girls; she was a diabetic and died while she was still in high school. Mrs. Prescott gave me her dead daughter’s room to sleep in.
     I ate with the family and helped out but I never said a word about my condition. Mr. Prescott was a director on the school board, and I didn’t want them to find out about me, that I had that. Trying to keep that secret made me feel like I had done something disgraceful. All the time I stayed with the Prescotts I worried that I would have a seizure at night. Sometimes during one of those, I urinated. I was so afraid of wetting the bed that I dehydrated myself at night. Those two weeks were a nightmare. But the family never found out about me. I got through it.
     For two years I taught at Union. The third term, I asked for a raise. The salary was fifty dollars a month for eight months. The school board said they could pay fifty-five dollars a month but they weren’t going to do it, and they gave the job to another teacher.
     At one school where I tried to get a job the principal’s wife was hired instead. I complained that it was nepotism, but the school board said it wasn’t because the superintendent of schools had given his approval.
     Teachers could be fired for some pretty simple reasons. Once I made a mistake and lost my temper with a boy. I didn’t hit him or anything, but I sent him home, and his mother complained to the school board and I was let go. I shouldn’t have done that. And that boy, he left school and went to work, and later on he was sent to the penitentiary and served five years.
     Richards, Missouri, was a little town in a rural area. The school board hired me to teach first and second graders, and also to teach music to the seventh and eighth graders. The first day was always the worst. At Richards, these seventh and eighth grade boys came into my room while I was trying to teach. Oh, those kids! They said, “We’ve run every teacher off and we’re going to run you off too.” That’s what they’d done; frightened every new teacher so bad on the first day that they left on the night train.
     By the time I went to Richards I had learned to put on what I call my bulldog collar. Sometimes, even when it chokes, you have to go ahead and do something you’d rather not. I put on my bulldog collar that day at Richards. “That’s what you think,” I said. “I’m going to go down these aisles with this ruler, and if you try anything, I’m going to start slapping right and left.” I said, “You’re going to sit down and behave. I came here to teach this school and I intend to stay here.” And you know, they sat down. They were petrified. Those kids liked music, but they didn’t like teachers. They didn’t want to study in school. You know what those kids would do? At recess, instead of going out the door, they’d climb out the open window.
     The second year I had a seizure at school. It happened after classes were over for the day, so the children didn’t see me, but another teacher found me at my desk, and then it got out, that I had that. The movie “Gone With the Wind had” just opened in the movie theaters. The school board let me finish the term, but they wouldn’t let me come back.
     A few principals fired me because they thought I wasn’t enough of a disciplinarian. I loved school myself and I thought children learn better if they weren’t afraid of their teachers. But school boards demanded strong discipline. Teachers were expected to stand over the children and make them study, and to whip them with a wooden paddle if they misbehaved. The thing I disliked most about teaching was having to whip the children. I feel guilty yet today that I ever hit a child.

     As soon as I had saved a little money, I enrolled at the University of Kansas. I took courses during the summers until I graduated with a degree in education and English. At different times over the years I took additional education courses at several smaller colleges in Missouri. To pay for my room and board I took jobs tutoring and babysitting. One summer I was a private tutor for a little boy who was an epileptic, but I didn’t tell his mother and dad that I was that way. His parents were Christian Scientists and they didn’t believe in medication. His mother wasn’t very realistic about her son’s condition either. She used to say, “Now, if everybody would just think that he was all right, he wouldn’t have those.”
     Little John was twelve years old, and my job was to try and get the boy through a course of study. I lived with the family, and one night little John came downstairs and pounded on my bedroom door. I was in bed, in my nightgown, but I got up and put my housecoat on, and got the door opened up. Johnny ran inside my room quick as he could because he thought his dad was going to beat him for having a seizure. I just stepped in the doorway, blocked it kind of, and said, “You’re not going to touch him. He can’t help it.”
     Another summer a Mrs. Rogers hired me to help out around the house and take care of her little girl. She gave me a bed in their little girl’s room. Mrs. Rogers was very nice and I always ate with the family until she had company, and then she wanted me to eat in the kitchen. I learned not to let humiliating things like that hurt me. Worse had been said and done to me.
     For one six week period, I babysat evenings and weekends for a Mrs. Grimes in exchange for my room and board. The first time I had a seizure the family kept me on. But then I had a second one, and I woke up in a hospital room with bars on the window. That was a living hell until my folks came and took me back home.

     I worked in Illinois, Missouri, Colorado, New Mexico and California. I never learned to drive and always had to depend on somebody to haul me around, or else take the bus or, once in a while, the train. Always I traveled alone, usually by bus, from job to job, from state to state. I had to be a very independent woman. I took risks, and I look back now and I think I was a pretty brave woman considering the circumstances. I stayed so many different places where I had no family, no friends. I lived among strangers. I might have a seizure any time, and if I had, a man could have done anything to me. I didn’t like to be out on the street alone, but I was out on the streets alone a lot. At the time I never thought twice about it. I just kept going on.
     In-between teaching jobs and during summer vacations, I traveled back to Kansas City and found other work. I’ve done everything. I clerked in a dry goods store. I was a secretary at a dental college. I sold books. I took inventory. I worked for the Mercantile Bank as an elevator operator. I cleaned the bedrooms of the patients in a tuberculosis sanitarium. I worked as a night waitress. Really, I had to be careful. I couldn’t keep those night jobs very long because I’d have a seizure. And if I kept on working nights, I’d have another and then I’d have another. But people always wanted me for the night shift. Those were the jobs I could get.
     Once I was so discouraged that I wrote to the Missouri state school for the feeble minded and asked if I could teach there. I thought if I worked in a place like that I wouldn’t have to be afraid. But they rejected me. The reason they gave was that I might have a seizure while I was giving the children a bath and drown them.
     I worked for very small wages. I very seldom ever had an apartment of my own. If I was boarding on a farm I would help out with the chores in exchange for my room or to lower the rent; if I was living in a little town, I would do the family’s washing and ironing as well as my own. One woman, her idea of heaven was ironed sheets on the bed, and I ironed them. The houses where I stayed were nice, but I could be asked to move on short notice, and then I had to go to work and find another place quick.
     I’ll just tell you how I lived. I would fix oatmeal and put a little bit of condensed milk on top to give it flavor. When I could, I took groceries from home, stuff that my folks had raised on the farm and preserved, and I kept that in my room. For snacks I’d get me some apples because they didn’t cost too much. I bought clothes at bargain sales and made them last as long as possible. I didn’t have very many, but I didn’t want people to see just one dress all the time. I used to wish we could all wear uniforms.
     Once in Kansas City, I was so broke I couldn’t pay my rent. That day I got out and went up to an employment agency because I heard there was a job as a file clerk and the company was paying ninety dollars a month. Well, the woman at the agency wouldn’t even send me for an interview. She said, “You’ve got too much education for a job like that.” Why, ninety dollars a month would have been a fortune to me!
     I thought I would have to go over to Garfield Avenue where there was a home for destitute women and ask them to let me stay until I could find a job. But then another woman, a stranger, came over to me and said, “I’ll tell you about a job. I just came from the Milner Hotel. They want a maid to do the work there at nights. You go and see if you can get it.”
     Well, I got the job. I made beds. I ironed. Once the boss sent me to clean her apartment; she had a dog and she didn’t walk it.
     A Negro woman was working at the hotel as a maid and she was also a university graduate. There we were. Two college graduates and two maids. We worked seven days a week and we were paid a dollar a day and the hotel gave us a place to sleep, but no food. For two weeks I lived on day-old bread and peanut butter and bananas. When I got my first pay—fourteen dollars—I went out and ate a seventy-five cent meal. You could get a whole meal for that.
     I used money just the way I did toothpaste: Squeeze out just a little bit and make it last. Really, I was very conservative. When I was broke, there was no place I could go to borrow money. I kept myself, and I paid for my education at the University of Kansas City, and when I got married, I had fourteen hundred dollars saved.
     All the time I worked at the Milner Hotel I was looking for a teaching job. Finally I got me a school. I got back into teaching again.
     St. Mary’s, Missouri, was a Catholic town in a farming area. I taught at the public school until one day I went back to the rooming house to eat my lunch, and I had a seizure. The people at the house called Dr. Beame, and told him what happened. Dr. Beame was on the school board, and he came to see me. He said, “We don’t have anything against you and your teaching. We think you’re a good teacher, but we would hate to have something like that happen before the children.” That was the excuse they always used: They were afraid for the children. Of course, they always liked to have another reason, and Dr. Beame said that I wasn’t sociable enough. It was true that I didn’t go down to the saloon and dance and play like some of the others. Any free time I had, I spent reading. I loved to read. I think I read all the books in all the libraries of every school where I ever taught.
     It was after I lost St. Mary’s that I read an article in Capper’s Weekly about a doctor who was treating epilepsy with sodium dilantin. I’d been taking phenobarbital, and I had tried bromides too. They did not help me enough, and I wanted this new medicine. So on my way back to Kansas City, I stopped in Saint Louis and went to a place where I could buy this new drug. They made me take a mental test. The questions were pretty simple: the names of the presidents, some addition and subtraction problems, and other questions. I remember one was: If you were to go to New York City to Columbia University, would they have a courtyard or a yard? When those people looked at my answers, they stared in amazement. I had told them I was a university graduate, but they didn’t think anybody with epilepsy could have that much sense. They just assumed I must be retarded or crazy. That was the general attitude. People said a lot of mean things to me, and I had to keep going and learn not to let their ignorance and prejudice hurt me. But it hurt anyway.

     On Sunday, December 7, 1941, I was still in St. Louis. I came down from my room, and a stranger on the street said, “Have you heard? We’re at war!” World War II. The Japanese war. After that people started to go into defense work, and teachers became scarce.
     The Victory School was a country school. Fulton was the nearest town, and was noteworthy because of a unique church. An Episcopalian church in England had been dismantled and sent over to Fulton and reconstructed, just the way the London Bridge was many years later. At Victory I had to supervise children who made things out of wood, and I had to buy the wood out of my salary. It was common for students and teachers to buy their own books and pencils and supplies. Taxes just paid for salaries and the building expenses.
     I was unhappy at this school, and my friend, Emily Short, gave me the address of the Boulder Teacher’s Exchange in Colorado, and they sent me a whole list of schools that were looking for teachers. I applied to a bunch, and I got four replies in one day. Victory was paying about eighty-five dollars a month, and Crested Butte offered one hundred and twenty a month, and for twelve months too, not just the term. Victory’s school board said they wouldn’t stand in my way. They would allow me to resign, even though it was the middle of the term.
     I stayed until the first of November. After the Halloween bazaar and program, the children all came to see me. They brought crepe paper and asked me to decorate the room for my own party. I did, and they brought me little candies and gifts. I was so touched, I almost didn’t go.
     The little town of Crested Butte was high up in the mountains of Colorado. Later on it became a ski resort, but when I taught there, it was just a coal mining town. A lot of immigrants from Eastern Europe came there to work in the mines. The only transportation was by mail truck, and the road was steep, winding and narrow. I’d never been in the mountains before. On the way we passed a place called Menturn, and I said, “I know how this place got it’s name. It’s where men turn back.”
     When the mail truck dropped me off, I went straight to the school. The principal said, “You can look around today, and you’ll start teaching tomorrow.” I used the rest of the day to settle in, and I started teaching the next morning at the Garfield School. Edwina Walsh and I taught the fifth and sixth grades. We both taught the slow and the smart. Special education didn’t exist. One year Ethel would teach the smart ones, and the next year I’d teach them. Edwina was such a warm and friendly woman. The day we met, she introduced herself in a way that just made me feel truly welcome. I’ve never forgotten her.
     Rooms had been easy to find but that changed once the war started. I tried to stay in a motel, but I almost froze to death. Mr. Strednik, who was a miner, said I could come and stay with his family. The room and board was about fifteen dollars a month for an upstairs room.
     Just before Thanksgiving we had a big blizzard. For two days the storm raged until we had twelve feet of snow. Plows worked day and night to keep the roads open, piling up enormous drifts. In Crested Butte, the schools stayed open. I made my way to school through the drifts of snow and I built the fire to warm up the building. The little girls did not wear snow suits or pants. They waded through the deep snow in their winter coats and boots. The snow fell over their boot tops and soaked their bare legs and ankle socks. I put their wet hose on the radiators and I wrapped their cold feet in anything I could find, even old cleaning rags.
     After school, I walked home. The drifts were so deep that the two little Strednik girls came outside and shoveled the walk so that I could get to the house. One of the girls and I both fell into an enormous drift. I felt like I was drowning.
     I had a seizure at Crested Butte, but I didn’t lose my job because the doctor said it was heat stroke. Later on, I found out why he showed compassion—his wife had a niece who was that way.
     Crested Butte wanted me back, but I resigned to accept a better offer at Red Cliff. That was another mountain community and the weather was brutal there too.
     And the same thing happened—I left Red Cliff because I got a better offer from Selma, California. The climate in Selma was warmer, people grew grapes and English walnuts and oranges, but we had two earthquakes while I was there. When I told my dad, he said, “If it had been me, I’d be getting out of that state just as fast as I could.” I stayed in California because the salaries were better.
     And for the first time, in California, I admitted on my application that I had epilepsy, but I said, “It’s controlled by medication.” I was taking sodium dilantin and phenobarbitol. Capsules and little white pills. The school board took me. They said it was okay, and I never had one seizure while I worked in that state.

     In California I taught Japanese children after they returned from the internment camps—I said they were concentration camps. Those children were afraid to come to school. They were afraid they would be beaten up. I had a Caucasian boy who said he was going to kill one of oriental children. Another white boy didn’t want to sit next to them. And one little boy, he said he was going to beat a little Japanese girl to pieces.
     Me, I liked teaching the oriental children. They were well-behaved and eager to learn. In my experience, the hardest to teach were the big, white teenage boys who didn’t want to learn. One little oriental boy in my room was just as meek as could be. I told the students in art class that they could draw whatever they wanted, and he drew a perfect outline of Abraham Lincoln with the words “With Liberty and Justice for all, except me.”
     Selma hired me to teach a third year, but I resigned because I got married and stayed in Kansas City. I worked almost all my married life. At first, I didn’t teach. I worked in the library at the dental college until Dr. Rhinehart (he was the administrator) came and said, “Now, Mrs. Cunningham, we know that you’re going to have to leave.” He meant that I was pregnant, and he was eager to replace me.
     After my daughter was born, I stayed home for seventeen months, until my husband and I decided we needed to buy us a house. Then I knew I had to work. I hired babysitters to take care of my daughter and I went back to teaching. I said it was the best thing I could do. By this time, a married woman was allowed to hold a teaching job. When I was a girl, a woman had to quit as soon as she got married.
     I still got me a job every summer, all my married life practically. I worked at Pritchard’s Cafeteria in the salad department from eight in the morning until nine at night. American Can was the same deal. At night, I’d always try to get down to the bus line and catch the last bus so I wouldn’t have that long walk home. But ended up I was always walking anyway.
     Always, in the fall, I’d go back to teaching.

     In all, I taught for thirty-four years.
     I think about how low our salaries were. My first teaching job paid fifty dollars a month for eight months. You weren’t paid for the summer. Sometimes I got seventy-five a month, sometimes eighty-five. The most I ever earned was eight hundred a month and that was for twelve months. People keep saying things were cheaper then, but everyday living was harder.
     Missouri treated its teachers so low. California and New York had a retirement system for teachers a long time before Missouri did. In Missouri, a lot of teachers went on strike to get a retirement plan. They marched back and forth, back and forth. They were determined get their way about it, and they kept on marching until they won out. I didn’t march, but I said that I agreed with them.
     A teacher must inspire children to study, and at the same time, see to it that they are able to use what they have learned and apply it later in life. This I tried to do. My students seemed to learn. The parents told me their children were learning. I did a lot of work with slow children because other teachers and parents noticed that I would take the time and trouble to help them. And truly, a great deal of time and planning was necessary to get each student to do his or her best. The pupils thought I was a strict teacher, but I had to be. I had so many students sometimes—I’ve had as many as sixty-nine pupils in a class. If the children were going to progress, I had to make every minute count.
     The call to a religious life never left me. In every town where I worked, I joined the Methodist Church and I tried to satisfy that call by teaching religious classes to adults and Sunday school and by working as a volunteer with retarded and handicapped children. I began to write because I discovered that poems were a place where I could open my heart without fear and speak truthfully about the sorrow I had known because of a disability.
     While I was teaching in California, I heard about the death of my friend, Emily Short. She was afflicted like me, and to get her last job, in Fullerton, she had lied about her age. I hadn’t heard from her for some time, so I wrote to her landlady. She wrote back and that’s how I found out that Emily had died alone in the night, during her sleep. The school called the boarding house one morning to ask why Emily hadn’t come to teach. The landlady said, “I know she planned to go. Last night she was down in the kitchen cooking fudge to take to her class.” The landlady went upstairs, and found Emily dead. When I heard, I thought, “Well, fifty-two. That would be long enough.”
     I often thought of suicide, especially during the years when I was alone, before I married and had a daughter and a home of my own, and then again after I lost my husband. When I was teaching in Colorado, I wrote a poem: “I scan the mountain heights, I scan the water falls, I wonder if what I take both day and night, Would be best to end it all?” I thought maybe I could take an overdose of my medicine, or jump off one of those high cliffs. What kept me going was my faith, the faith that inspired me to want to be a missionary. I’d say to myself, “Hold on, Mabel, hold on. Hold on one more day and see what happens.”

next story