Myrtle Lillian Greening, Simi Valley High School (CA) English Teacher
I had lunch this week with a friend and colleague I've known for nearly fifty years. Fifty years, and we are still finding out interesting new things about one another. At one point during our long conversation, he suddenly asked, "Did you always want to be a university professor?"
My answer was no. And as I've thought about his question over the last few days, I'm pretty sure I would never have gone to college, much less become an English professor, without Mrs. Greening. She changed my life.
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| Mrs. Greening, photo from my high-school yearbook, The Pioneer (1968) |
No one in my family had ever been to college—my mom always claimed to be the first person in her family ever to have graduated from high school, and while she said quite a few things that later proved to be, well, not quite true, I believe her, about this at least. And although he said nothing one way or another, I learned long after his death that my dad had never finished high school.
When the idea of college came up, my mom was insistent that if I were really college material, somebody from a college or university would come knocking on my door and hand me an invitation. As far as taking the SATs (and paying to take a test?) or filling out a college application (and paying to apply?)—she wouldn't hear of it. No way. I think my mom really expected me to get a job and start working once I graduated.
But Mrs. Greening encouraged me, and she helped me navigate the many difficulties I encountered. Because of her, I managed to take the SATs. This was an expensive exam for me, when I was earning fifty cents an hour babysitting! I applied to college too. I was accepted. And, thankfully, I got a scholarship that meant I could go.
I visited Mrs. Greening a couple of times once I started college, at least in the first year or two. But after that, I lost touch. I never forgot her, but I wish now with all my heart that I had let her know what I was doing—I owe her so much. In fact, I owe her the profession that I had for nearly forty years and, really, the life I have lived since I met her.
Mrs. Greening didn't think much of me when I first showed up in her twelfth-grade English literature class. I was too busy fooling around with my best friend, Karen Ley. On one particular day very early in the school year, we were elbow wrestling at the small table we shared in Mrs. Greening's classroom, and she was furious!
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| Mrs. Greening, photo from my high-school yearbook, The Pioneer (1968) |
But in the first days in Mrs. Greening's class, I wasn't all that interested in the poem that would come to mean so much to me. I did fine—I remember Mrs. Greening being very surprised at the first essay I wrote for her, clearly not expecting too much of me. But, then, we read Hamlet.
I still remember the day in class when everything changed. It was very early in our reading of the play—the first scene, in fact. It's midnight, and a guard, Francisco, is waiting to be relieved by his replacement, Barnardo, who arrives right on time. The two are on the battlements of Elsinore Castle, cold and fearful—they've seen a ghost. Then Marcellus arrives, bringing with him Horatio, who thinks this ghost is all a "fantasy." Marcellus has brought Horatio along to wait with them, to see whether the apparition will appear again. It does come, a ghost that looks like the king who has just recently died . . .
So far, simple enough. But then, after he sees the ghost for himself, Horatio says, "It harrows me with fear and wonder" (1.1.44).
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| The Dell paperback Hamlet we read in 1968--I still have my copy |
We had been reading slowly in class, everything pretty straightforward to that point, though I do remember some discussion about Francisco's jittery "Stand and unfold yourself"—the unusual verb choice, "unfold," is underlined in my copy of the text. (I still have the copy of Hamlet we used in our class, a Dell paperback that cost 35 cents!)
But when we got to "It harrows me"—I remember Mrs. Greening explaining to us what a harrow was, making her fingers into the sharp tines of the tool, her hand dragging those tines through the air so we could imagine the metal teeth ripping up the earth. It was electric. And here I am, nearly sixty years later, with that scene in Mrs. Greening's classroom still fresh in my mind.
I have been able to find out a little bit about Mrs. Greening's life in the last couple of days using genealogical resources. Myrtle Lillian Palmer was born in Reeds, Jasper County, Missouri on 16 January 1918. That would have made her fifty years old when she was my teacher.
In the 1920 US Census, when she was two years old, she was listed as the youngest of six children, the family living in Jasper County, Missouri, where her father Richard's occupation is listed as "farmer."
By the time of the 1930 Census, taken when Myrtle Lillian Palmer was twelve years old, she was living in Reeds, Jasper County, Missouri, in a household headed by her mother, Mira (from Elmira). The census taker writes "none" for Mira's occupation. Just the youngest two of Mira's children are still living with her in the home, Myrtle and her older brother. While there is no sign of Richard Palmer living with them—Mira is the head of the household—Mira indicates that she is married. I can't find Richard Palmer in this census.
By 1940, Mira (spelled "Myra" by the census taker) is living alone, now in Sarcoxie, Missouri, and says she is divorced. She lists her occupation as "seamstress," a job she has had for the last forty weeks. I can't find Richard Palmer in the 1940 Census either, but in the 1950 Census, he is living alone in Sarcoxie Township, Missouri (this census form says Sarcoxie is "1 3/4 miles from Reeds)." In the census, he says he is divorced.
But by the time of the 1940 Census, when her mother is living alone, working as a seamstress, Myrtle Lillian Palmer was no longer in Missouri. On 15 October 1938 in Los Angeles, California, Myrtle Lillian Palmer married Edward Frank Greening—she was just twenty years old. I would love to know how a very young woman got herself from Missouri to California. I haven't been able to find out anything,
Searching the various volumes of the Los Angeles City Directory, available online, I've been able to find listings for a "Palmer, Myrtle E." as early as 1924, working as a stenographer, but clearly this couldn't be the Myrtle Palmer I'm looking for—my Myrtle Palmer would have been a child. I check all the LA city directories from 1924 on, right through the 1930s, and I can't find the right Myrtle Palmer, Myrtle L., and after a few years, that other Myrtle, Myrtle E., disappears.
But in 1938, I do find Edward Frank Greening in the LA city directory—he's a clerk, renting a place on Oakford Drive. These directories list wives in parentheses, and there's no (Myrtle) following his name, nor is there a listing for Myrtle Greening, in parentheses or otherwise, in 1939 or in 1940. To my great disappointment, this resource provides no helpful information at all.
I am still left wondering how the woman I knew as Mrs. Greening made her way from Missouri to Los Angeles. In 1930, she was twelve years old, living at home. Eight years later, in 1938, a twenty-year-old Myrtle was in California, having lived there long enough to have met and married. Did she leave Missouri when she was eighteen? Did she travel alone, on a dream or a whim? It occurs to me that one of her older siblings might have moved to California, and she could have traveled west to live with a brother or a sister . . .
I go back to the online genealogical sources and trace her siblings, four brothers and a sister. One brother moved to Kansas, where he died; another moved all the way to the West Coast, but to Seattle, where he died (and where I am living now). The rest of her siblings stayed put in Missouri. I can find no connections to California among any of them. I check the paternal line, and I can find no links to California associated with Richard Palmer's father or grandfather. I search the maternal line, and I can find no connection to California there, either.
I search for that Myrtle E. Palmer living in Los Angeles in the 1920s—she was born and died in Southern California. I see no links to Missouri or to the Richard Palmer who was Mrs. Greening's father. And just to be sure, I check back through the Palmers in Myrtle E.'s family as well.
Aside from the record of her marriage, I can find no sign of Myrtle Palmer Greening before the 1940 US Census, when she and her husband are living in Los Angeles, renting a house on East 7th Street. Neither one has anything listed under "occupation" or for the "type of industry" in which they are working—I wonder if Edward is in college, or maybe they are both in college, because at some point, Myrtle Palmer Greening did get a college education.
There is a lengthy obituary for Mrs. Greening's husband, Edward Frank Greening, published in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat after his death in 2003. There he is called an "engineer extraordinaire" and said to have "helped the USA win the Cold War." According to the obituary, his family had moved from New Mexico to Glendale, California in 1921, so that explains how and why he was in California when he married Myrtle Lillian Palmer in 1938. He was educated at "LAJC [Los Angeles Junior College, now Los Angeles City College] and USC [University of Southern California]," where his education was "often interrupted by events such as the depression, marriage, child, and World War II." According to the obituary, "he was among the last to be called to serve" during the Second World War, and was "on a destroyer approaching Japan when the [w]ar ended."
I have no idea where Myrtle Greening was during the war years, or what she might have been doing when her husband was "on a destroyer approaching Japan"—other than knowing she was caring for a child, born in 1941. According to the 1950 US Census (when she was thirty-two), Mrs. Greening was still living in Los Angeles, now on Buffalo Avenue, her husband listing his occupation as a "newspaper carrier." I guess he hadn't become an engineer “extraordinare" yet. The couple had a nine-year-old son. According to the census, Myrtle was "keeping house." You have to love the 1950s—one of the questions is "Did this person do any work at all last week, not counting work around the house?" The census taker writes a big "N[o]" next to Myrtle Greening's name. Eight years later, Mrs. Greening's son graduated from Van Nuys High School. A 30 January 1958 article in the Valley News includes his name among ceremonies honoring those graduating mid-year. His photo also appears in the 1958 Van Nuys High School Yearbook. So Mrs. Greening was living in Van Nuys at that time.
But suddenly, after a great deal of digging, I find something—in the 31 October 1960 issue of the Valley News, there is an article titled "Valley Dean's List Honors 22 Students."* And there she is: among the "upper division students" who are honored for their grade-point average. The college she went to, then San Fernando Valley State College, is now the University of California, Northridge, just over the hill from Simi Valley, where Mrs. Greening was teaching in 1968, when I was in her class. This article confirms her residence as Van Nuys. With this lead, I could find the date when Myrtle Greening graduated from college. An article in the Valley State Sundial, dated 26 May 1960, "A Salute To Valley State's 1960 Graduates," lists "Myrtle Lillian Greening, English."
By the time I knew Mrs. Greening, in the late 1960s, she was divorced. She never spoke of an ex-husband, or even a son. Edward Greening, who received such a lengthy and effusive obituary, had remarried in 1965 and had a second family. Mrs. Greening remained single.
Nor is there any obituary for her, or at least not one that I have been able to find. In fact, I can't find out much about Mrs. Greening's life after I graduated from high school. When she was my teacher, she lived in a small house on Eve Road in Santa Susana (in Simi Valley), which is where she regularly hosted a group of students for evening meetings of the Simi Valley High School Literature Club.
I cannot remember all the books she introduced us to in Lit Club—I know we read Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, and I was so knocked out by it that she suggested I read his An American Tragedy. Wow. We also read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. So she wasn't introducing us to lightweight novels. She's the person who also introduced me to J.R.R. Tolkien. I eventually bought the paperbacks published by Houghton Mifflin in the late sixties. I wish I had them now. (I still have Tolkien, in later, fancier editions.)
Looking online, I can easily find the house where we met for Lit Club all those years ago—it's worth nearly a million dollars today, but it doesn't look like much. The two-bedroom bungalow was built in 1956, so it wasn't that old when I spent many long evenings there, but it was very different than the tracts of look-alike houses that were being built on land that had once been walnut groves or orange groves. The real-estate listing says the house now has an "open plan" that makes it look "larger than what it is." It wasn't open plan in the late sixties, but as soon as I saw the interior of the living room, with its stone fireplace and wood-beam ceiling, I remembered them. The small kitchen and living room, once divided, were warm and cozy. And there was no pool in the backyard either, as there is now.The Zillow listing describes this as "a newer flagstone pool with baja shelf and fountain waterfalls."
I have no idea when Mrs. Greening retired, but I've been able to narrow it down a bit. I found her photo among the faculty in the 1982 Simi Valley High School yearbook, The Pioneer, but by 1985, she is no longer pictured. She would have been sixty-five in 1983, so that makes sense. (There are only scattered yearbooks available online at Classmates.com.)
Update: I just found a copy of the Simi Valley Star, published on 6 June 1985. On page 6 is a small article, "Retiring employees are recognized." And there she is: among others who were retiring, Myrtle Greening received a plaque from the Board of Education for her twenty-three years with the district. (So she began teaching at SVHS in 1962, just six years before I was in her class.)
Looking at property records, I can see that the property on Eve Road sold in 1997. According to online records I've been able to access, that seems to be when Mrs. Greening sold it. The United States Residence Database, 1970-2004, indicates that she was living in Oxnard, California, in May 1995. She would have been seventy-seven, so maybe it was time for her to let go of that small home on the half-acre lot. Did she want to leave? Did failing health mean she needed to leave? Could she no longer afford the house? Did she move to be closer to friends? I have questions but no answers.
On 19 January 2000, Myrtle Lillian Palmer Greening died at the age of eighty-two. The Social Security Death Index notes her "Last Place of Residence" as Ventura, California. She is buried in Simi Valley. I hope some of her former students visit her gravesite on occasion. I know the next time I visit family in the area, I will lay flowers there, to commemorate the woman who changed my life.
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| Mrs. Greening's headstone, Simi Valley Public Cemetery (photo from Find a Grave) |
*Among this list of students on the Dean's List is another of my high-school teachers, Gloria Gunther. What a surprise!
