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Farm girl – Marian Pagel – D

We’ve been learning about Marian Pagel’s childhood on the Schroeder farm west of Marshall, how she and her siblings helped on the farm from an early age, and their experience attending the nearby District 9 country school.

District 9 closed after Marian completed the sixh-grade, so she and her siblings continued in the much larger Marshall Public School District.

Marian was a shy girl, so Marshall’s huge Lyon Street School was not a comfortable fit. Her first day of the big school was hardly encouraging.

“I remember going up the stairway, I was so shy and so afraid. Miss Perkins was right at the top of the stairway and the first thing I saw was her manhandling a great, big kid. That did it! I was afraid to go to school,” Marian remembered with a laugh.

She reflected on her difficult school transition, “Going to all the different classes and meeting all the new people was hard for me. And, of course, the work was so different than the teaching out at the country school. It was much more challenging. It wasn’t that I wasn’t smart. It was hard to catch up and I was too young.”

Marian described other practical limitations, “We always rode the bus. So, we never participated in after school activities because we had to go home. The boys — they played football, but they would have to walk home.”

World War II was raging during these years and Marian recalled local boys enlisting for service or being drafted, “I remember that and I had two uncles in the service — Mom’s two brothers.”

She remembered other effects of the war, “We could only have so much sugar. I remember having these coupons that we could take to buy sugar.”

After the war’s end, Marian’s neighborhood changed when the Pagel family moved to the farm next to the Schroeders. The Pagels’ son, Duane, quickly noticed the attractive neighbor girl, Marian.

She shared a story. “I was in the yard one day and he was on that side road with his tractor, but his eyes weren’t on the road so he went into the ditch with the tractor,” she recalled, laughing.

Duane spoke in his defense, also laughing at the memory, “She was mowing the grass in her shorts.”

So, there was an early attraction, but Duane shared Marian’s shyness and did not ask her for a date for some years.

Marian graduated from Marshall High School with the class of 1948. She continued her education at Westmar College in LeMars, Iowa, graduating with honors and a degree in elementary education in 1952.

She began her professional career in Sheldon, Iowa, teaching first-grade for three years.

Duane entered the Army during the Korean War. He was home on leave in 1953 when he saw Marian at a party his sister hosted for him. Standing outside with Marian under a big moon that night, Duane resolved to act on his long-standing attraction. He drove to town the next day to call her — his family did not have a phone – and asked her on a date.

Duane remembered, “So we went out – and then I guess we started writing letters back and forth. It doesn’t seem that long ago.”

Duane was discharged from the Army and bought a farm near the Schroeders in 1955, the same year Marian left her position in Sheldon.

She explained, “I came back to Marshall and taught at Montevideo for one year. Every weekend I rode home with a teacher from Russell.”

Marian and Duane continued dating, married in 1956, and began life as a farming couple.

Marian said marriage changed her career prospects,

“Those days, if you were a married woman, you were not allowed to teach in the Marshall District.”

She and Duane operated their farm together and began a family, welcoming Byron, Bonnie, Gregory, and Gary.

Marian and her family experienced tragedy in 1970 when a car struck and killed Gregory while he was helping clean the highway ditch near their farm.

She recalled that was also the year she returned to teaching, “When Gary went to first-grade, I went back to teaching. That was the year that Greg was killed I went out to Southwest College and renewed my license.”

For 23 years Marian helped Marshall’s first-graders learn their foundational skills, teaching at East Side Elementary next to a former neighbor.

“Mrs. Regnier was a Nelson. Her sister, Shirley, was in my grade and we were good friends. So, I knew Mrs. Regnier as we grew up. Then I ended up teaching with her for many years,” Marian recalled with a smile and a laugh.

She reflected on the satisfactions of working with young students.

“The most important thing for me was the joy seeing the children learn. I always worked with the slow learners for reading. The joys there were immense because they start out with nothing and then when you see these children graduate, some of them graduating with honors, who started out in a slow learning class.”

Marian, ever the farm girl, also worked with Duane on their farm until Byron took over the operation in 1989. About her farm work she said, “I always enjoyed the outdoors. I enjoyed the lawn, the gardening, working in the field. I just was an outdoor girl.”

Thank you, farm girl, for changing so many lives in good ways for so many years.

I welcome your participation in and ideas about this exploration of prairie lives. You may reach me at prairieviewpressllc @gmail.com.

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