Information
1) author: Chris Burditt (11th gen from Robert)
2) title: South Intermediate School
3) regarding: Chris Burditt's seventh grade
4) location: Saginaw, MI
5) timeframe: 1957-58
6) author's email: napabiker@aol.com

Content:
Seventh grade teachers Ruby Gibbs and Glenn Rolffs changed my life in 1957. I realized there was a lot to learn about mathematics and English.
At David H. Jerome Elementary School we studied mathematics as computation skills and English as spelling lists. One teacher did all subjects in one classroom. We had no texts to take home and, consequently, there was no homework. We were graded S-satisfactory, I-improving, and U-unsatisfactory. I enjoyed doing art and sometimes classroom murals for open house events. Since the school days were kind of long to a kid like me, I accepted the role of providing periodic humor to the class. Early in the fall, my sixth grade teacher moved my desk into the hall and denied me playground priviledges. I spent the whole year separated from my classmates.
So I was very happy to go to a new school for the grades 7-9, South Intermediate School. My mother begged me to keep my mouth shut in class and let someone else provide the entertainment. This turned out to be relatively easy because SIS provided a real academic challenge, homework, specialist teachers, and switching classrooms every hour. I worked on homework about two hours every night in grades seven and eight, and three hours in the ninth grade. (That third year I had honors English with June Roethke, sister of American poet Theodore Roethke.)
In English class in the seventh grade, I was fascinated with diagramming sentences. I don't think this fascination was widely shared! I felt sorry for my English teacher, Glenn Rolffs. He seemed uneasy before the class of unruly seventh graders. He was tall and portly. He had an odd way of pronouncing Iowa, with emphasis on the "o." But Mr. Rolffs taught me the inner workings of English grammar. With diagramming, every word in a sentence had a job to do and a place to go in the "fish bone" diagram. I loved the orderliness.
My mathematics teacher, Ruby Gibbs, played a truly critical role in my life: in her class I decided to become a mathematics teacher. Ruby Gibbs donated one of her weekly lunch periods to provide mathematical enrichment to students she selected from all her classes. I was one of the students she selected for this special weekly class. While I did very well in most of my classes, this was the only teacher that gave me special recognition. It made me pay more attention to mathematics and consider that I had special talents in this subject. I always did the mathematics homework first.
Ruby Gibbs lived to 100 years of age. In her obituary I learned she had been the head of a Michigan teachers' college and retired before teaching at SIS. That's a career path not followed by many retirees: from a college campus to the "frontlines" in junior high school. I visited her several times after she retired. She told me that she also invited students in need of extra one-on-one help to another one of her weekly "brown bag" lunch periods in her classroom. She was genuinely dedicated to serving all students to the best of her ability.

Information
1) author: Chris Burditt (11th gen from Robert)
2) title: Margaret McDonald Burditt
3) regarding: Margaret McDonald Burditt
4) location: USA
5) timeframe: 1904-1994
6) author's email: napabiker@aol.com

Content:
My mother was born August 20, 1904, in Kings Park, NY. That's about mid Long Island, not far from Huntington, where I was born in 1945. Her mother, Maggie (Margaret)McCristell, was born in Ireland. I suspect she came to the US as a young girl to work as a domestic servant. My mother's father was John McDonald, born in Smithtown near Kings Park in 1870. His father or grandfather was from Ireland. John worked like a trucker of today, except with horse and wagon. John and Maggie married in December of 1900 in Amityville on Long Island. My mother's siblings were an older brother John and a youger sister Marion. There was a brother Francis who died in infancy.
Margaret's parents moved the family several times before 1911. She was naturally left-handed, but was taught (and required) to write right-handed in school, as commonly done at the time. One day the elementary school principal came to her class and wrote on the board with her left hand. My mother was impressed with the injustice done to her and other children who were natural left-handers. She never forgot this.
My mother's childhood was marked by serious loss: both of her parents died from TB from 1911-12. There may have been an epidemic in the NYC area which also first took the life of Francis. From 1911-22 Margaret and her sister Marion were raised by aunts who never married. They may possibly have been in a Catholic religious order. (This is hard to verify since my mother and her sister don't appear in the 1920 US Census.) Catholic teachings and prohibitions played a large role in my mother's life. My mother depended on two things in her life: her Catholic faith and Lucky Strike cigarettes.
After graduating from high school in 1922 and attending a business school program, she worked for the Beach Nut Packing Company in New York City. In 1928 she married my father William Byron Burditt and moved to Chicago to raise a family. There they had three children: Byron, Marion, and Robert. Marion and Bob are fraternal twins and have remained close throughout their lives. In 1930 my father and mother and Byron were sharing an apartment with my father's aunt Jessie Randolph and her husband Raymond Randolph.
My father was born in 1904 in Cooperstown, NY, and was quite different from my mother. He loved to hunt, she hated guns. He was not religious, she was very Catholic (she was not happy when Latin was replaced with English in the Mass). He appreciated alcohol, my mother hated drunks. My father was outgoing, my mother was reserved and guarded. One thing they shared was losing both parents at an early age, about seven years old. In my father's case, his father, Byron Henry Dean Burditt, left his family soon after the birth of his fourth child, Jessie, in 1911 in Boston. Consequently my father and his younger brother Dean were raised in Cooperstown by their grandfather William Dean Burditt and his second wife Anna. My father's two sisters, Vivian and Jessie, were raised in Manhattan and later West New York City, NJ, by their mother, Vivian Hotaling Burditt.
My mother raised me as an only child after her separation from my father in 1945. I was in foster homes from ages 3-7 while my mother worked in New York City as a private family cook. I lived with my mother in Huntington, NY, from ages 7-9, and then in Saginaw, MI, where I finished grades 4-12. There in Saginaw I met my three siblings and their families.
It gave my mother some great satisfaction when I graduated from the University of Michigan in 1967. What else did she like? Maxwell House coffee, Lucky Strikes, music of the 1920's and 1930's (she mentioned she had foolishly turned down a marriage proposal from Jimmy Dorsey and instead married my father!), reading murder mysteries, and watching the Alfred Hitchcock show on television.
The last ten years of her life were very sad. We watched her endure her worst nightmare--Alzheimer's disease. In 1949 she worked for the Dodd family in NYC. She cooked for an older widow in this wealthy and well-known Eastern family. Mrs. Dodd had dementia. My mother dreaded a similar end. I remember spending a summer at the Dodd home in Paris Hill, Me, in 1949 and still have a photo taken there. My mother believed in avoiding shadows in the subjects' faces, so all her photos have her kids being blinded by the sun. In June 2004 I revisited Paris Hill and found the home where I stayed that summer and rode my tricycle. It has an old jail, now a library, named for its favorite son, Hanibal Hamlin. He was Lincoln's first Vice President.