Week 36 - Off to School

This prompt conjures up lots of ideas...schoolteachers, students, what I loved and hated about my school years. Here are two people from the same small town, 44 years apart in age and from two different generations, yet they impacted youth, each in their own way.

My favorite person involved with school was my mom. Lorraine (Sheridan) Porter. The year I went into the 7th grade at Central Intermediate School in Midland, Michigan my mom went to work in the cafeteria! Horrors! My mom would be able to know everything I was doing. The friends I made, teachers that didn't like me. She would suddenly 'know all'! Thanks Carolyn (my sister) for talking her into applying at the school just so she would be able to be off in the summers and Holidays to make it easier for the 'littles'...my two younger sisters. 

But actually, mom going to work in 1965 made it easier for me. She always had change in her pocket so if I forgot to get my 35¢ for lunch, I just went through her line instead of the one I was supposed to get in. She never asked me how my day was going, it's as if I didn't exist. She was doing her job, not taking care of me. 

She was 40 years old when she went to work there and she worked for 24 years for Midland Public Schools. My husband would talk about how wonderful lunches were at Central and how lousy they were at the High School. And he remembered mom in the lunchroom and so have many other people over the years. She had a knack of remembering names and faces and we would often chat about different people she had interacted with. 

She wore a white uniform dress and white shoes.  She would go out to work in the morning just before 7am and she worked until 2:30pm. It gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling to have her so close for those three years at school.



The other person was a member of the Sheridan family that little would be known about. Grandpa Sheridan's first cousin.

His name was Claude Joseph Miller. He was born May 24, 1880, in Fulton township, Gratiot County, Michigan. Fulton became the town of Perrinton, due to the fact there was another town named Fulton already in Michigan.

Claude was the son of Michael Francis 'Frank' Miller and his wife Margaret Sheridan. Margaret was the daughter of Patrick and Margaret (Hughes) Sheridan. She was more commonly known as Maggie. The younger sister of my great grandfather Michael Sheridan.

Claude was the youngest of their two sons and when he was out of Fulton schools, he proceeded to teach in Perrinton for two years. He then headed West and worked in the harvest fields of North Dakota. Afterwards he went to Minnesota and spent two years working in the logging camps. By 1902, he had returned to his hometown and proceeded to enroll at the Central State Normal at Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. (CMU) 

After five and half years, he graduated with a bachelor's degree in pedagogy (the method and practice of teaching) and a life certificate for teaching in Michigan.

Claude married Mabel Demoray 26 June 1911 in Shepherd, Michigan. Mabel was also a teacher when they married. In 1920, she was not teaching, but in 1930 she is again listed as a teacher. They had three children Woodrow, Margaret and Marie. 

In 1915 he was hired by Ecorse, Michigan to serve as Superintendent of Schools in that city. He helped to develop and expand Ecorse schools and worked there for 24 years, only leaving because of death. He died 28 Aug 1939 in Lincoln Park, Michigan. Both he and his wife are buried in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Detroit. 

The Claude J Miller Elementary School (School One) was named following his death and although the original building was torn down and rebuilt in the 1990s his name is still attached to it.

Barbie






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