Cecil A. Partee Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

a tie-in between that and what we called manual training. We had a manual
training shop in our high school and you learned to make small household
items. With coping saws and this sort of thing, you would make something
like a hall tree or what they called a rack for a newspaper stand, footstools,
and those kinds of things, we used to make that. And then, one or two weeks
during the year, they would switch off; the girls would take shop and the boys
would go into the domestic science classes.
Q: Oh'? Did you learn to cook?
A: No, not very well. (laughter)
Q: Do you remember any of the specific projects in the shop there that you
had made?
A: Yes, I remember making a hall tree and I remember making a foot stool and
I also took a plywood and made a newspaper rack, where you would put your
newspapers and magazines.
Q: Do you enjoy working with that type of . . .
A: Not really, no, besides I had little manual talent.
Q: Did you hold leadership in that organization at any time?
A: Yes, I was either president or vice-president, I can't remember. I do
remember I was president of my senior high school class. I was salutatorian,
a girl was valedictorian. There was a very narrow margin between us, but
she was valedictorian and I was salutatorian.
Q: How were those positions selected? Was that by election by the student
body ?
A: No, no, by your grade point average.
Q: What courses did you like best in high school?
A: Mathematics and English.
Q: Who was your mathematics teacher?
A: Professor M. M. Wilburn. He also was my Latin teacher. I had three years
of Latin and the fourth year we took a course called Latin derivatives which
is really a vocabulary building course. We just took Latin words and we took
the stems of Latin words and built the English words from them. It was really
a good base for vocabulary. I can remember we used to have fun, you know,
and say--I remember saying to my mother one day, "You should have been downtown
to see the conflagration consume numerous edifices." And, very shortly thereafter,
she said to me one morning, "Arise my son, the nocturnal illuminator
has wended its way into oblivion. That means, 'get up! "'