A BIT OF HISTORY: Martha Cowan  (Part III)
Martha Goes to School

Donald W. Hawthorne

For a woman who claimed she did not like school, Martha Petty Cowan finished in record time.

When Martha was small she helped in the family’s General Mercantile Store that was located just north of where Beeson’s Cafe is now.  When she was 5 years old and her sisters, Esther and Ella went to school; she was left alone with no one to play with so her mother sent her to school.

Mrs. Odell Palmer was her primary teacher.  Miss Mamie Lilly Long taught her 2nd and 3rd grades, Mrs. Vera Lilly Long was her 4th and 5th grade teacher, and Mr. Owen King taught the 7th and 8th grades.

 

This is one of the first school buildings in Cache.  Picture was taken in 1909.  Aldene Twineham (Petty) is tending to the animals.

She went to the primary and first grades in the first year at Cache School, and when she was in the 7th grade, the school officials decided to move her up into the 8th grade even though she did not want to be promoted.  Consequently, Martha turned 16 just two months before she graduated from high school in 1927.

This brick schoolhouse was built in the early twenties. This is where Martha spent her school years.

It became the grade school when in 1937 the new High School building was completed. (The kindergarten classes are now housed here.) The old grade school burned in 1948.

Martha was the senior class president.  Earl Mercer was the vice president, Frances Hollander was the secretary and treasurer, Bernice Wilson was the sergeant at arms, and Thelma Nottingham served as the class’s yell leader. That year the class colors were purple and gold, the class motto was, “Forward ever, Backward never,” and the class yell was, “Yea, Cache Yea, Seniors, Yea, Yea, Cache Seniors,” There were only five graduating seniors in the 1927 class of Cache High School.

The Class of ’27 Salutatorian was Frances Hollander who later married Pete Wynn.  Wynn served as the Western District Comanche County Commissioner for a number of years.  The Valedictorian was Thelma Nottingham (Cox). 

How many people still have the program from their Baccalaureate Service and High School Commencement?  Martha Cowan does!

This is the Cache School auditorium where Martha and her classmates received their High School Diplomas.  In the picture, W.B. Cox, Jane Abel, and Gordon Ray are practicing for a play.

In the 1927 school year, there were only four “holidays”.  School was let out in September for the County Fair.  There were two weeks off in October so the kids could help with cotton picking.  The Christmas vacation was from December 23 to January 2 and then in March school was “let out” for the Comanche County Basketball Tournament, which was played in the daytime.   The seniors also got “Class Day.”   On this day in 1927, the graduating class put on a program for the school and then went to Lake Lawtonka for a fish fry and boat rides. Austin Petty, Martha’s father drove the class on the outing in his car.

THE CLASS OF 1927
 

Thelma Nottingham 
 (Cox) 		 Bernice Wilson Frances Hollander
(Wynn)		 Earl Mercer Martha Petty
(Cowan)

Martha’s father, in addition to being the Mayor of Cache, served on the School Board.  Martha said back in those days the school board members would visit school while it was in session and they would walk up and down the hall listening to the teachers instructing the class.

Martha tells about her sister, Esther Petty (Norris) being the only person in her graduating class of 1921.  The school did not change anything in the way they treated her class. She marched in to the traditional graduation march, and they had a baccalaureate service and the commencement program, including speakers and all the rest of the ceremony.

When Martha graduated from high school, she immediately went to work at the Cache telephone office, which was located where what became City Hall and now is the Restoration Church.  (The last telephone office in Cache was in the building next to Blue Moon.) She worked as a telephone operator for nearly two years leaving there to begin her 40-year career with the United States Postal Service. During that time Miss Jessie Mae Cox was also a telephone operator.  In later years, Myrtle Plumblee (Terry) and Cora Davidson were operators.

 Martha seldom misses the Cache Alumni Association meetings.  At the 2003 annual gathering of former students, she was the oldest Cache graduate in attendance.

Martha recalls that in the early days of Cache, stores and homes used coal oil lamps for lighting, and then white gas lanterns replaced the lamps.  She does not remember the year that electricity was brought to the town.  But she does remember her father was the mayor and a dynamo engine mounted on a wooden trailer was parked by their home just outside the Petty sisters’ bedroom.  Martha said that they did not get much sleep because the generator ran all night, but it was worth it, because they had one bright light bulb in the house. Mr. Petty talked Howard Barnard, who owned the telephone office, into putting electricity into Cache.


This is the third in a 4 part series about Martha Cowan and her memories of her life in Cache.
Part IV