Doris Clementine Tellex was born in Rochester, New York in 1931, the daughter of Peter Anthony and Clementine Pauline (Collins) Tellex. Peter was born in Massachusetts, and Clementine was born in New York State, but all of Doris’ grandparents were Lithuanian immigrants. In 1940, Doris and her three siblings were living with their parents in Irondequoit, Monroe County, New York. Doris was an elementary scholar and had completed the third grade. The 1950 census located the Tellex family still residing in Irondequoit; Doris’ grandfather, Peter Tellex Sr., was living with the family, and Doris was working as a telephone operator for the public telephone utility. Doris was married later in 1950 to Kenneth Brown Chase, also a native of Rochester, New York. Kenneth had served with the United States Navy during World War II. He was at the Naval Training Station in Sampson, New York, and at the Fleet Sonar School in Key West, Florida. The Chases moved to Michigan, likely because of Kenneth’s employment with General Motors – his obituary in the Democrat and Chronicle of Rochester, New York said that he had worked for General Motors – Rochester Products Division. They had five children – two sons and three daughters. Kenneth died in 1977 at the age of only fifty-one years. So, Mrs. Chase was recently widowed when I met her in the fall of 1981, when she was my third-grade teacher.
Avondale School District, “facing a budget deficit and declining enrollment,” closed and sold Stone Elementary School in 1979, and then closed Elmwood Elementary, my school, in 1981. All the Elmwood students were redistributed among the remaining three elementary schools in our district – Graham, Auburn Heights, and Stiles. As we lived closer to Stiles, I began riding the bus to Stiles Elementary School starting in the third grade. I was assigned to Mrs. Chase’s third/fourth split class. Mrs. Chase was a good teacher and cared about her students. She used a cane for walking, and it seemed she probably had done for some time, even though she was only fifty years old. I remember walking with Mrs. Chase on the playground when she had recess duty, listening to her tell us how she used her cane in her right hand so that it would act like a second right leg, to support her own right leg. I found out very recently that she had had polio as a child, and it left her with a weakened right leg.
I can’t remember what I was writing, but I was in Mrs. Chase’s class, and I needed to write the word “character” but didn’t know how to spell it. I also didn’t know how to say it, a problem encountered by many children who learn to read early – my reading vocabulary greatly outpaced my spoken vocabulary. I went to ask Mrs. Chase how to spell it and tried for “chuh-rack-ture” but she couldn’t figure out what I was asking, and thought I meant “tractor”. I tried to circumlocute, telling her it was a word that meant a person in a story or a cartoon, but just could not get my meaning across the barrier between us, and she was trying to run a reading group. Credit to Mrs. Chase, though, she got me to give the spelling my best guess, and she was able to figure out what I was talking about and gave me the correct spelling.
After having no reading group at all in second grade, I was in a reading “group” by myself in Mrs. Chase’s class, although half of the kids in the room were fourth graders. I had my own set of readers and comprehension sheets and would do the work independently. Mrs. Chase just let me work at my own speed and somehow there was always another book ready for me at the end of the previous one. Except the day we had a substitute teacher. Mrs. Chase had left me a new book and comp sheet, and the substitute had it in her head that I was not allowed to have the comp sheet with the book, even though I explained that was how I always did it. I read the story and went to ask for the worksheet. The sub rolled her eyes at me and told me I couldn’t possibly have read the whole story in that time, and that I should “go back to the desk and read the story properly.” I sat down, read the damn story again, and went back to ask for the sheet. That time she yelled at me, called me a cheater, and said that she would be taking the book away before she would give me the sheet. I sat down in tears, read every page of the book again through wet, blurry glasses, watched the clock for at least twenty minutes more, and when I finished I wordlessly gave her the book, took the sheet, filled it out correctly in my best handwriting in two minutes, and took it back to her before pulling out the paperback I’d brought to school myself, and did my best to ignore everything she said for the rest of the day. When Mrs. Chase came back the next day, apparently the substitute had written quite the little rant about me, because Mrs. Chase told me she was sorry she hadn’t been clearer in her instructions for my reading activity. I never had another problem with a sub in that class.
Mrs. Chase had a huge set of classroom decorations and would change up the door and room decorations at least once a month, depending on holidays and classroom activities. When we did the school fair, the cake walk was always in her classroom. We all thought she was a good teacher and a nice lady. Mrs. Chase wrote in my end-of-year report card: “Wendy is a delightful student. She has good study habits. I have enjoyed her in my class.” I was, even by age eight, very good at discerning what adults wanted from me, and very, very good at providing exactly that. I was a people-pleaser under construction.
I believe Doris Chase, coming up on her ninety-fourth birthday, is still living in Rochester Hills, Michigan. She started her working years as a telephone operator and retired a well-loved elementary school teacher. Kudos to you, Mrs. C.
Comments
Post a Comment