I have been thinking that this was a good idea but I am having trouble with dates. Please add anything that you think might help with this. The very preliminary beginning of a rough draft history is below.
My Grandmother Smith was a graduate of Brigham Young University, first with a normal certificate, which certified her to teach school. Later, she returned to the Y and received her B.S. degree. Some of the stories she told about those days when she was at the Y should be preserved. I am likely the only person still alive who remembers some of those great stories. Although a do have a couple of cousins, Toni Jackson and David Childs, who might remember some of it.
Her family lived next door to the Woman’s Gym, still standing in Provo. Now it is a boutique. Back then it was the scene of many of my grandmother’s favorite days. She was active in women’s basketball, gymnasium and dance. In fact, she was one of the first women to receive a Block Y for her athletic skills.
The two-story frame house, where the family lived, was not demolished until the 1990s when it was replaced with an apartment complex. Oddly, though Grandmother visited me in Provo when we were students at BYU (my husband graduated in 1966) and though she herself attended the university as a mature student in the 1950s, none of us ever stopped to take a photo. An then, as with many good things, it was gone.
Accodring to “Wikipedia,” the free encyclopedia, concerning the history of BYU, “In 1903, Brigham Young Academy was dissolved, and was replaced by two institutions: Brigham Young High School, and Brigham Young University. (The BY High School class of 1907 was ultimately responsible for the famous giant "Y" that is to this day embedded on a mountain near campus. The Board elected George H. Brimhall as the new President of BYU. He had not received a high school education until he was forty. Nevertheless, he was an excellent orator and organizer. Under his tenure in 1904 the new Brigham Young University bought 17 acres of land from Provo called ‘Temple Hill.’ After some controversy among locals over BYU's purchase of this property, construction began in 1909 on the first building on the current campus, the Karl G. Maeser Memorial. . .”
This history, of course, pre-dated Grandmother’s attendance at the school. When she went there, it was a university and she was educated well. She became a teacher and was employed as such. Her earnings also helped her sister receive an education. Jessie became a secretary. Grandmother said, years later, that she wondered at the wisdom of the family decision to train one as a teacher and not the other. “I think that Jessie had the personality to be an excellent teacher.”
Jessie, however, was a person who liked to have a bit of fun. In fact, one story concerning the Woman’s Gym had to do more with her father and younger sister, Jessie, than with her. Jessie liked to dance. In those days it was forbidden for those attending dances at the gymnasium to do the fox trot. It was considered a bit risque at the time. However, Jessie liked to tease and she and her dance partner would got to the far corner of the gym. There they would do a few fox trot steps and then move back into the more sedate waltz. However, little did Jessie know that her father, John Pritchett, gazing from the upper window of his home next door observed her shenanigans. When she got home that evening, she was in deep trouble with her father.
My great-grandmother, Mina Ericksen Pritchett, provided food for boarding students at the Y. I have no idea what the cost for a good hearty supper may have been but it must have been very reasonable because she fed quite a few boarders. Those were happy days for the family. Mina was a good cook and had been trained in fixing big meals at good prices by her mother-in-law when the family lived in Mount Pleasant. After Levi Franklin Pritchett, John’s father, died at a young age, his wife, Sarah Ellen Bean, took in borders to pay for her living expenses. Even after she remarried, she kept up the work. Mina, when she married into the family, helped with the cooking and cleaning. Mina did that until she and her husband, John, decided to move to Provo. John had worked for Mina’s relatives, the Ericksens, who ran a pharmacy in Mount Pleasant. It was decided that they would move to Provo, Vivian, my grandmother, and Jessie, her sister, would attend the Y. John would train as a pharmacist with another relative, who owned Mabin Drug. There were also two boys in the family but they were younger.
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