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ROOM 204  ·  HARMON HIGH SCHOOL  ·  1937 – 1979 MAGISTRA FERRIN Miss Adelaide M. Ferrin 1913 – 1999 Salvete, discipuli. That is how she greeted us every morning for forty-two years, standing in the door of Room 204 with a piece of chalk in her hand. "Hello, students." If you did not answer Salve, magistra you went back out into the hall and tried again. My name is Martin Oyler. I sat in the third row of Room 204 from 1967 to 1971, and today I am a family doctor in Terre Haute, Indiana. I first put up this page in March of 1997 for Miss Ferrin's 84th birthday. My daughter printed it out and took it to her at the nursing home, and Miss Ferrin sent it back to me with two grammar corrections in red pencil. (She was right both times.) Miss Ferrin died on July 9, 1999, in her sleep, at 86. So the page is a different page now. I have left the old parts mostly the way they were, and added what I could. I. Vita (her life) Adelaide Ferrin grew up on a farm in Putnam County, Indiana, the youngest of five. She told us she learned her first Latin from the backs of the medicine bottles in her father's barn. She went to Indiana University on a scholarship, read Classics, and came to Harmon in the fall of 1937 to teach Latin I through IV and, for a few years during the war when the men were gone, typing and girls' basketball as well. She never married. She said she had eleven hundred children and that was plenty. She drove a green 1959 Rambler until 1978, when it finally died in the faculty lot and the shop class towed it home for her. She spent her summers traveling, and every fall we got the slides: Rome, Pompeii, Hadrian's Wall, the Roman theater at Orange, a bath house in England, and one famous year a two-week trip to Greece that she said was "research for Latin V." She retired in June of 1979. The Latin program at Harmon lasted three more years without her. II. Room 204 If you had her, you remember the room. The plaster bust of Augustus on the file cabinet, whom she called Gus. At Saturnalia he wore a paper laurel wreath, and one December somebody gave him a mustache in grease pencil. She never found out who. (It was Denny Sauer. Sorry, Magistra.) The pull-down chart of the five noun declensions over the blackboard. She could pull it down without looking and hit the exact line she wanted with the pointer. The map of the Roman Empire at its greatest extent, with a red thumbtack in every place she had been. The coffee can of chalk stubs. She never threw a piece of chalk away until it was too short to hold. The sign over the door, hand-lettered on a window shade: LEGE · DISCE · RIDE. Read, learn, laugh. That was her own motto. She said the third one was the one most teachers forgot. III. What She Taught Us Latin, of course: four years of it for the ones who stuck, from puella and agricola in the fall of the first year to Caesar's Gallic War in the second, Cicero in the third and Vergil in the fourth. But she was really teaching something else under it. She taught us that English is mostly a pile of old words wearing new clothes, and that if you knew the Latin underneath you could figure out almost anything. When I got to medical school in 1975, the boys next to me were memorizing anatomy terms like telephone numbers. I just read them. I have thought of her every working day for twenty-four years. She taught us to do it right or do it again. She taught us that a sentence has a skeleton, and to find the verb first. She taught us that nobody is too old or too important to look a word up. And she taught a lot of farm kids from a small Indiana town that the world was very big and very old and that it belonged to them too. Every spring the Latin Club put on a Roman banquet in the cafeteria: togas made out of bedsheets, grapes, a roast chicken standing in for a peacock, and the seniors lying on gym mats to eat. She sat at the head table in a purple bedspread and ruled the room. IV. July, 1999 The funeral was at the Methodist church in Harmon on Tuesday, July 13. I counted at least sixty former students, from the class of 1941 to the class of 1979. Somebody had gone to the storeroom at the high school and found Gus, and he sat on a table by the guest book, wearing a fresh paper wreath. I have never seen so many grown people cry and laugh at the same time. Her nephew asked me to say a few words, and I got through about half of them. What I meant to say was this: she was the first person outside my family who expected something of me, and she would not let me off the hook until I did it. Room 204 for A.M.F., by M.O. The chalk dust hung in the morning light like something old that wanted to be read. You found the verb. You set the ending right. You made a dead tongue sit up in its bed. Forty-two Septembers at the door, the same hello, the same stub in your hand. We came in farm kids. We went out with more than we could name, or yet could understand. The room is gone. The school has a new wing. But in some hospital, some court, some class, one of us looks a word up, and the thing you gave us opens, and we let it pass to someone younger, who won't know your name. It was the gift you wanted, all the same. V. Memoriae Since July I have received more than ninety e-mails from people who had her. I have put the ones I was given permission to share on a page of their own: Memories of Magistra Ferrin. If you were in Room 204, please write and add yours. Tell me your class year. The Harmon High School Alumni Association is collecting for a Latin prize in her name, to go to a graduating senior who plans to study a language in college. Harmon doesn't teach Latin anymore, so the prize will go to a Spanish or French student, which I think she would find funny and also fine. E-mail me and I'll send you the details. VI. Vale Gratias tibi agimus, magistra. We thank you, teacher. Requiescat in pace. Visitors to Room 204 since March 1997 Memories  |  Write to Martin Martin Oyler, Harmon High School, class of 1971 [email protected] Last updated August 29, 1999