After high school my mother attended what was then College of Marshall, now East Texas Baptist University. She transferred to Baylor University after a year and ended up with a degree in Music from Baylor. She took her first job, primary-school music teacher at New London, Texas, in fall of 1936. She and another teacher, Myrtle Braswell, became best friends and rented a room in a local home owned by the Holt family. Here are Mom and Myrt, in pictures taken from the 1941 Londana, the high school yearbook. I suppose Mom owed her life to Myrt's cigarette habit. On a walk toward the high school after primary-school classes had ended on March 18, 1937, Myrt realized she had left her coat, containing the cigarettes, in the building they had just left. My mother waited for her while she went back to get it. Had the women kept walking, they would have been inside the building that exploded.

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