The Denver Post titled this "A Teacher Who Inspired, Stimulated and Believed"

Sunday, May 19, 2002

The greatest teacher I ever had started out teaching in our rural area with emergency certification. Jennie Abbott didn’t get her bachelor’s degree until five years after I was in her 8^th grade class.

Under the president’s "No Child Left Behind" Act, Jennie wouldn’t have been considered for emergency certification. And yet whatever facility I have with the English language began with her teaching. My love of poetry came from her.

And every one of us, her students, could diagram a sentence.

She inspired me, stimulated me, and believed in me. One six-week grading period, when I received three As, four Bs and a C+, she wrote in the teacher comments, "Does nice work, is capable of doing better."

She made me feel smart.

Jennie Abbott was as kind and loving as she was large. She read to us every day after the lunch period, a book chapter or, her great love, poetry. She read beautifully, with all the appropriate accents, and when she’d read the last line of a poem -

"An' I says ‘'M go' to be a Raggedy Man! -- I'm ist go' to be a nice Raggedy Man!’ Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man!"

- she’d look up at us and smile, and her eyes would twinkle.

Another thing every one of her students learned was "The Highwayman," that great poem by Alfred Noyes. She coached us until we could do it by heart, and then we presented it to, I think, the Rebekkah Lodge members. I can still recite most of it.

The last few minutes of class, most days, she would throw out a math problem – "What’s 5 times 4 plus 12 divided by 4 plus etc" – and we would all strive to be first with the answer. She encouraged intellectual competition. After dinner at home, she would often play a game with her children – cribbage or gin or poker, anything competitive – and the loser had to do the dishes. She made learning fun and interesting.

One year she was chosen as Colorado Rural Teacher of the Year. Her husband Jack said, "Well, my gosh, Jennie, look at what you had to compete with!" but she was really proud of it.

Jennie was raised on a sheep ranch in Cokeville, Wyoming, and began teaching in 1923. Ranchers in the Laramie River Valley would hire a young kid out of high school to come and tutor their children at the ranch, rather than boarding them in town. Jennie taught two students that first year. The following year she taught several boys at another ranch.

Then she married, had children, and worked during the war as a volunteer at the Laramie hospital and as an industrial nurse at an aluminum plant, among many other things. In 1945, the family moved to Cowdrey, Colorado, a wide spot in the road between Laramie and Walden, after Jack Abbott was made general manager of a plant there that made wooden barrel staves.

Jennie immediately went to find out what the school was like, and discovered that the school board was thinking of busing the students into Walden, 9 miles away, because they had no teacher. She didn’t want her three children, Jackie, Jan and Jay, on the roads during the North Park winters, and so the school board told her they could get her an emergency credential if she wanted to teach. She taught 30 students in all eight grades in that one-room schoolhouse. It had only one potbelly stove, in the middle of the room, and when it was excessively cold the students would gather around the stove and she would read to them, mostly poetry. Midway through, she would look at one of the students and say, "Now you take it from there." Several of her students went on to obtain Ph.Ds.

In 1951, the family rented a house in Walden and Jennie began to teach in the grade school there. During these years she took extension courses during the winter and spent the summers in Laramie at the University of Wyoming, taking as many courses as she could manage, until she got her degree in 1958.

I don’t recall that she ever told us what she was doing, but something inspired me to attend college (on and off) for 22 years until I got my degree.

There was infinitely more to Jennie Abbott’s life than these few words can capture. She was generous - with her time, her food, her house. Whenever anyone got sick, Jennie would go to see what she could do to help. She’d bring food and make sure that they had someone to stay with them at night. One of her children would ask, "How long is Mom going to stay there?" Jack would respond, "Until they get well." He accepted it graciously, because that was just something they did when someone got sick.

Once they hired a plumber, a man named Russell Sloan, to help Jack install a sewage system in the house in Cowdrey. The first day he worked there, Jennie said, "Well, you’ve got to stay and have dinner because it’s too late for you to go home and fix something now." He protested, but she insisted, so he ate dinner and slept in his truck that night. The next morning Jennie made him take a shower and then fixed him a room at the back of the house.

Russell was supposed to finish the job in four or five days, but he kept getting other jobs and so he never got through. He stayed for 18 months. After a few months, his sister came out from Kansas and stayed two or three months at the Abbott house, and then found a job in Walden.

Jennie died the year after she got her degree, a great tragedy. Walden lost an exceptional teacher and she had so little time to enjoy her achievement. But the degree was only a piece of paper and didn’t begin to describe or circumscribe her amazing gifts as a teacher.

I never had the chance to tell her so.

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