Helen Kilgore

“Helen Stough Kilgore passed away on January 20, 2014. She was born in Detroit, Michigan on December 10, 1927. She was educated in the Detroit school system and graduated from Cooley High School in February of 1944. She was an athlete in high school and lettered in several sports. After high school she enrolled in the University of Michigan where she met her husband, James. They were married while they were both still in school. She was a member of Kappa Delta Sorority. She eventually graduated from Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti with a degree in elementary school teaching. Her first job as a second-grade teacher was in the Rawsonville, Michigan school system. Later, she taught in the Pleasant Ridge school system before retiring to raise her family. She returned to teaching in 1964 in the Avondale, Michigan school system until retirement in 1991. She and her husband James were avid sailors and enjoyed many years cruising the great lakes on their live-aboard sloop. They also enjoyed many years of travel around the world. She is preceded in death by her husband James A. Kilgore, and is survived by her children James A. Kilgore, Jr., David N. Kilgore, and Dr. Sue Ann K. Bauserman. Arrangements under the direction of Valley of the Sun Mortuary & Cemetery, Chandler, AZ.”

In 1930, Helen was living with her parents, David and Helen Stough, in Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan. They were living in the same house on Lawrence Avenue in Detroit when the census was taken in 1940. Helen, aged 12, had finished the sixth grade. Helen was pictured in the 1943 yearbook for the Durfee Intermediate school in Detroit. In the 1944 Cooley High School yearbook, Helen is pictured as a member of the Girls’ Varsity Tennis squad. The 1946 yearbook told that she was a member of the National Honor Society, a co-captain of the varsity tennis squad, and “Cabinet Treasurer”. Helen was married in 1949 to James Alden Kilgore in Detroit. The 1950 census located James and Helen residing on University Terrace in Ann Arbor, Washtenaw County, Michigan, where Helen was a primary grade teacher working in the county grade school.

 

I met Mrs. Kilgore in the fall of 1980 when I began the second grade at Elmwood Elementary School. She was fifty-two at the time, exactly my age now. She seemed so very, very old to me, but was only seven years older than my beloved first-grade teacher Mrs. Bauer. I didn’t like her, not one little bit. After missing 2 ½ days of first grade, I missed 10 days of second grade. I can vaguely remember feeling unwell almost all the time that year and being able to convince my mom I was sick now and then, enough for her to let me stay home. Naturally, the pediatrician usually could find nothing wrong with me. Mrs. Kilgore was mean to me from day one, and I never really knew why. Having substitute-taught in the second grade once or twice, I can imagine I was super annoying – I probably wasn’t very self-guided at the beginning. There was a kid in the second grade at Marshall Elementary in 2013 who was very smart and would finish every activity in less than half the time the other kids took to complete it. Then he’d be at my side, poking me in the arm, saying “I’m done, what do I do now?” I was probably much like that kid, and Mrs. Kilgore wasn’t prepared to constantly redirect me. Instead of teaching me how to redirect myself or coming up with new things for me to learn, she determined that I was too far ahead of my classmates and that I essentially needed to sit out the second grade, to give them all time to catch up. Where Mrs. Bauer had determined that I was reading at the sixth-grade level the previous year, Mrs. Kilgore wrote in the “reading level” blank on my report card for the first quarter: 2^nd grade; for the second quarter: 3 for enrichment; for the third quarter: 3^rd grade; and for the fourth quarter: 3^rd grade. I could still read at and beyond the sixth-grade level; Mrs. Kilgore refused to allow me to read anything beyond the third-grade level in her classroom. Every other kid in the room belonged to a reading group that met daily to read, silently or aloud, and talk about the stories they were reading. I was denied a reading group or any books at all, until my mom got wind of what was going on, and started sending books with me to school for me to read on my own.

 

Second grade was also the year I got glasses, which Mrs. Kilgore used as an excuse to deny me the “privilege” of using the bathroom. I can recall still having sat at my desk for a long time, bouncing my leg to keep from peeing my pants, waiting for there to be a break in the action so I could ask for permission to go to the restroom. I had already learned that Mrs. Kilgore hated to be interrupted, especially by me, for any reason. When she finally finished with a reading group, I got up and went to ask for that permission. I hadn’t even managed to open my mouth to ask anything when she told me I couldn’t go wash my glasses again (which I had never done at school, so even on the face of it she was wrong and mean), and I should sit down and find something else to do. She only had one volume, and it was loud, so of course everyone was staring at me by then, and I felt I had no choice but to return to my desk. I finally got to go to the bathroom the next time we were dismissed for recess, and I didn’t have an accident, but it was a near thing and certainly wasn’t good for my health. I had already begun denying myself fluids because I always felt humiliated by having to ask to go to the bathroom, and that incident only made it worse. You can probably imagine how I responded when my own child had an accident at school when the teacher did not allow dismissal to the bathroom. Or how I responded when, called to school to pick up an ill child only to find that said child was sick with a dehydration headache because said child was constantly denied the right to go to the bathroom.

 

It is certainly possible that there are lots of children who remember Mrs. Kilgore fondly, or some that credit her with teaching them to read or can recall something else that she made clear for them. I am sure that her family mourns her still, and that she was probably a good wife and mother. It’s even possible that 1980-1981 was a bad year for her personally, and she was unable to keep it from coloring her attitude toward me. She hated me because I was smart, and she made it okay for everyone else to behave the same way. There were twenty-one children in my second-grade class, almost all of whom were in my graduating class. At least ten of the children in my second-grade class were later involved in one incident or another that either caused me to feel hurt physically or emotionally or cost me friend relationships between the ages of eight and eighteen. This is still down to those small children watching Mrs. Kilgore’s neglectful and abusive attitude toward me, making sure everyone knew I was being punished for having knowledge and skills beyond my age.