Twila Kay Barker was born in 1940 in Michigan, the daughter of John and Lily (Hobbs) Barker. When the census was taken in 1950, Twila and her family were living in Troy, Oakland County, Michigan. Twila was a freshman at Avondale High School in Auburn Hills, Michigan in 1955. Twila attended Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan between 1959 and 1962. While at Cornerstone, she was a member of the Sigma Delta Pi sorority and played the flute as a member of a “gospel team”. Twila was married sometime after she graduated from college to Carl DeWitt Helferich, also a Michigan native. They had three children and belonged to the Saint Andrew Catholic Church in Rochester, Michigan. Both Twila and her husband Carl were teachers in the Avondale schools – Carl was a seventh grade English teacher at the middle school, and Twila taught fourth grade at Stiles Elementary School.
As a group, we had a rough year in fourth grade. Mrs. Helferich had a large shag carpet (probably a remnant) under all the desks, to prevent some of the noise that comes from nearly 200 metal desk and chair legs scraping on the floor. She also had a row of coat hooks on the wall by the door. Shortly after school started, the carpet had to be removed completely, and we were no longer allowed to hang our coats and bags on the hooks – there was a lice outbreak raging through the school and these measures were deemed to be preventative. Coats and bags were hung on the backs of our individual chairs, and we quickly learned to do without the carpet. Fortunately, I never got lice. My classmate Tracy did, though, but only once. Her mom was a nurse and probably knew exactly how to deal with them.
Some of the students who were in our class nearly the whole year are not even in our class picture, because they weren’t there at the very beginning of the school year. There were three fourth-grade teachers in our school that year – Mrs. Helferich and Mrs. Clouse taught fourth grade, and Mrs. Remsberg taught a four-five split class. Brandon, a refugee from Mrs. Clouse’s class, joined our class after a few weeks. Across the hall from Mrs. Clouse’s room, we could hear him crying almost every day. I had no personal experience with Mrs. Clouse, but she was a known quantity around school - she was extra mean. The day Brandon joined us he came in crying, and cried all day, but after that he was completely fine. The problem was Mrs. Clouse. Brandon eventually became a lifelong friend.
Ann, who had until that year attended elementary school at Holy Cross Catholic School in Detroit, arrived soon after the school year began. She was the only other child in our class (besides me) who wore glasses. Mrs. Helferich, who was barely acquainted with any of the children in the room at that point, said since we both wore glasses we had “something in common”, so she seated us near each other, and we became friends. Tracy, whom I already knew from third grade, Ann, and myself were usually together that year. Children, like adults, are flawed and fallible, but more so, and most are without any self-awareness of their flaws and faults. I am certain I wasn’t always a great person at the age of nine and ten, let alone a great friend. But I suffered a significant amount of emotional abuse from those two girls that year. It seemed my faults were always being pointed out to me, and punishments were always being meted out.
It was after Halloween but not yet Thanksgiving, and Tracy brought a doll to school. It was possibly meant to look like a cartoon – a round body, round head, some lines drawn on the head for hair, and I think it had a saying or message on the front. A novelty item. We had been talking among ourselves about what we would be doing for the holidays with our families, and I mentioned that my aunt always put up her Christmas tree on the day after Thanksgiving. Both Tracy and Ann laughed and one of them said “that’s stupid!” Later, when she was showing us her doll, I said I thought it was ugly. I don’t remember at least consciously clapping back because of their comment about my family’s holiday tradition, but later, when Mrs. Helferich had intervened, I didn’t have enough mental logic to defend myself with that. I remember being told that making rude comments about a girl’s doll was much the same as telling a mother that her baby is ugly. Whether Mrs. Helferich meant it or not, the message I received was that I was not allowed to express my opinion. I apologized, and relative peace was temporarily restored among the three of us. Little girls have long and vindictive memories, though, and things were never quite right with them again. There were multiple incidents through the winter when they would get sick of me hanging around with them, and when I would get near, they would snatch a chunk or snow or ice from the ground, throw it as far as they could, yell “go get the ice!” and run in the opposite direction. It sounds made up, ridiculous, untrue – but it absolutely happened.
Mrs. Helferich had to take an extended medical leave during our fourth-grade year to have gall bladder surgery. When she returned, she had her gallstones in a jar and passed them around so everyone could see. She was gone for what seemed like a very long time – it seemed like a significant portion of the school year, but it was probably a few weeks. Our substitute was Mrs. Dolehanty. She probably subscribed to the idea that a teacher is never a friend. She was nasty and had zero time for the emotional development of children. If a child needed something beyond the lesson plan (a trip to the restroom, extra help with an assignment, encouragement or enrichment), what that child got was a mean, biting comment and a lesson in how not to ever ask for that thing again.
Once Mrs. Helferich was back, my young mind had learned a lesson too well. I remember one time I was bouncing my legs so hard while doing a worksheet or something at my desk that Mrs. Helferich called me up to talk to her in the front of the room. She asked me if I was nervous about anything, not bothering to lower her voice, and rather than humiliate myself in front of the entire class (which was why I hadn’t asked to leave the room in the first place), I told her I was fine and went back to my desk. I still had to pee, but now I couldn’t even bounce my legs. So, another school year went by during which I spent all my school days either dehydrated or holding in pee.
Mrs. Helferich did not like science. I can’t remember studying science in school up to fourth grade, but I’m sure we didn’t learn any in fourth grade, either. In fact, we had begun getting letter grades in everything else (reading, language arts, mathematics, social studies), but on my report card from Mrs. Helferich’s class, science has a line through it for every quarter. She handed out a science textbook at the beginning of the school year, but we never took it out of our desks until we handed them back, dusty, at the end of the school year.
I had a bad year. It wasn’t really Mrs. Helferich’s fault. She for sure did the best she could in a time when children were either “normal” or required special education services. It definitely wasn’t my fault that I had such a crummy year, but that is my fifty-two-year-old opinion. I absolutely thought it was my fault when I was ten. I would spend the rest of my school years working hard to please authority figures, regardless of whether pleasing them was the right thing to do. I would also spend the rest of my school years and many, many years beyond that trying to make and keep friends from my peer group, in spite of (1) a complete inability to identify with or understand the thought processes of other girls my age, and (2) a complete inability to think or act like other girls my age. Obviously, I didn’t see it that way then, and always thought if I could just get the right clothes (the Guess jeans era, the fluorescent era, etc.), or participate in the right activities (cheerleading, gymnastics), or think the right thoughts, then I would have the popular people breaking down my door to be my friend. Fortunately, I don’t need or even want that anymore.
Carl passed away in 2007. Twila Helferich, aged about eighty-five years, still lives in Rochester Hills, Michigan, where she is also registered to vote.
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