Latin School of Chicago

Latin Magazine Anniversary Issue: 125 Years. Our Stories. Our School.

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Nancy Davis Reagan '39 "Nancy's social perfection is a constant source of amazement. She is invariably becomingly and suitably dressed. She can talk, and even better listen intelligently, to anyone from her little kindergarten partner of the Halloween party, to the grandmother of one of her friends. Even in the seventh grade, when we first began to mingle with the male of the species, Nancy was completely poised. While the rest of us huddled self-consciously on one side of the room, casting surreptitious glances at the men, aged thirteen, opposite us, Nancy actually crossed the yawning emptiness separating the two groups and serenely began a conversation – with a boy. Nancy Davis, center. windows on three sides in that large room and had plenty of light up there even on dark Chicago days. We looked down on Michigan Avenue a block to the east and the empty house that had belonged to Robert Todd Lincoln. In the 1930s Michigan Avenue was mostly houses and empty lots. "Our classes were down the hall of the fourth floor, west of study hall. First was French class taught by Mlle. Mutrux who we called Millie Mut Trucks. Next was the Latin class taught by Miss Brokaw. In that room we finished off our third year of Latin reading Virgil's Aeneid, which was considered light reading after our plowing through months of Caesar's Commentaries. We especially liked our science teacher Miss Turner because she was young and said to be engaged. Miss Turner's class was memorable when she gave each of us a frog to dissect and then watched us, grinning. Our physical education teacher was Miss Price. In the winter she watched over our playing endless games of basketball, then in the spring when it was warm enough to wear shorts we marched out of school two "Actually, my memories of Latin School would not be very "Her appearance in the First Lady. When the fatal night comes, Nancy knows not only her own lines but everybody else's. She picks up the cue her terrified classmates forget to give, improvises speeches for all and sundry. Just a part of the game for Nancy." — 1939 Vita Scholae 44 L AT I N M AGAZINE edifying, I'm afraid. A particular smell of linoleum and polish mixed forever with that unavoidable smell of sweaty little girls. And along that line, Miss Singleton's wonderful uniform list that included 'perspiration britches and perspiration blouses,' better known to the world, even then, as sweat pants and sweat shirts. I remember some august personage, actually the president of the senior class, handing over the mascot, a rather scruffy, banged up black and white bulldog, to me. I guess I was the president of the fourth grade." — Ann Cornelisen '44

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