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?)--well, she wouldn't hear of it. No way. I think my mom really expected me to start 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"--well, 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, 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 and father are both living alone, Myrtle Lillian Palmer was no longer in Missouri. On 15 October 1938--she would have been twenty years old--Myrtle Lillian Palmer married Edward Frank Greening in Los Angeles. I would love to know how a very young woman got herself from Missouri to California. In the 1940 US Census, the couple is living in Los Angeles. Neither one has anything listed under "occupation" or under "type of industry" in which they are working--I wonder if they are in college, because at some point, Myrtle Palmer Greening got a college education.
I was thrilled to find a "Salute to Valley State's 1960 Graduates" online, scanned from the Valley State Sundial--and there she is, "Myrtle Lillian Greening, English"! At the age of forty-two, she got her B.A. "Valley State" refers to what was then San Fernando Valley State College, now the University of California, Northridge--just over the hill from Simi Valley, where Mrs. Greening came to live and teach.
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 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."
According to the 1950 US Census (when she was thirty-two), Mrs. Greening was still living in Los Angeles, her husband listing his occupation as a "newspaper carrier." I guess he hadn't become an "engineer extraordinare" yet. Meanwhile, Myrtle was "keeping house." The couple had a nine-year-old son, born in California in 1941. According to the obituary published in 2003, Edward Greening's "first wife" (her name is misspelled as "Myrtie," but maybe that's her nickname) "bore his son, Jon Conrad, who lives near Tijeras, New Mexico, with his wife-"-Mrs. Greening's son had two children, a son and a daughter.
But 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, much less grandchildren. 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 homes 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 fireplace and the 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.
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--I wonder if that is when Mrs. Greening finally sold it. According to the United States Residence Database, 1970-2004, 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 her failing health mean she needed to leave?
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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