A Birthday Tribute to Jean
Oak Harbor News, August 10, 1989
80 Years of Farming Part of Jean Wardenaar's Fulfilling Life
By Dorothy Neil of the News-Times staff
When a young school teacher by the name of Jean Crosby came from teaching in Freeland in 1935 to be the second grade teacher in Oak Harbor, little did she know that she would spend the rest of her life on North Whidbey.
It was in the "zero" days of the Great Depression; Oak Harbor was a small town of fewer than 500, and the school district was very strict about their teachers' behavior. The letter Jean Crosby received from the school board said:
"At a special meeting of the school board you were elected to teach the second grade for next year. We are to pay $85 per month for a nine month period. We are asking all teachers who care to remain in our system to try to go to summer school as often as possible. We are going to pay according to the schooling or preparation a teacher possesses."
The letter continued with "We are not forbidding our teachers to dance, but we do not rehire them if they are dance crazy. We believe it is better if our teachers mix into community gatherings and attend one of the churches here. Yours for a bigger and better school next year."
Miss Crosby might have had an "in" with the school board because her father, later known as Judge Seth Crosby, a Spanish-American War vet, came to Whidbey Island by canoe in 1892 with his brother George and took a homestead on what is today named "Crosby Road". For a few years in his later years Seth Crosby was Oak Harbor's police judge.
Oak Harbor school teachers of 1935 were not only discouraged from being "dance crazy" but could not be married. There were no men teachers, men were given the administrative posts. And because of the depression when work was scarce, a married teacher had to resign because she had a husband who ostensibly was the bread winner.
When school teacher Jean Crosby met, fell in love, and married Whidbey Islander Jake Wardenaar, Jean and Jake were married in secret at the beginning of the 1935 school year on 13 September, 1935. They kept the secret until the following March and then announced the marriage. She was allowed to finish the school year, then they fired her.
But when the Navy came to North Whidbey in 1941 she was rehired, and taught in the old two-story frame building where the "flat top" building today stands near the stadium in the Navy's Quonset Huts, and at Oak Harbor Elementary and Olympic View.
She taught 47 second grade students in one class when "there weren't enough books to go around." The war-years school district was hard put to provide not only school buildings but books and other materials. They traded the lack of money from the Great Depression to the war years of rationing and lack of materials.
"I loved teaching," she said, "they are little human beings, and it is a privilege to be able to teach. After I retired, I tried substitute teaching, but I didn't like the new way of teaching, so I just quit and retired to the farm."
Jean mentioned that among her first second grade students were Wes Maylor, Rosa and Larry Rip, among many others who still live on Whidbey Island.
Along with Crosby Road, another monument stands to the Crosby family, the little stone house on 400 Avenue East. The small square house is built entirely of smooth beach rocks collected by Jake Wardenaar for his father-in-law, Seth Crosby. The stones were brought in buckets from the beach and all had to be approximately the same size and shape, with the exception of one stone that looked and was shaped like an ice cream cone placed just above the north window. Today the little stone house is a favorite target for artists and photographers.
On the Wardenaar farm in Crescent Harbor, Jean learned to be a farmer's wife, and she and her husband raised a son and a daughter.
Jean Crosby Wardenaar's life was not all confined to teaching and farming. She took photography courses and has a wall full of pictures, mostly of the children, to prove it. She was an avid fisherman, having fished all around Whidbey and in Alaska, as one picture shows Jean holding two King salmon almost as big as she.
Although her teaching days are far behind, children make a point to wave at her from school buses as she takes her morning walk from the Harbor Tower Retirement Center. Her smiling face as she waves back shows the love she still holds for the children.
Jean Crosby Wardenaar's one sorrow is Oak Harbor's "build-up" of commercial areas. She remembers the fields now asphalted that supplied hay and grain for farm animals when North Whidbey was strictly rural.
It is hard to get a lifetime of farming out of one's system, just as it is difficult to forget the years of teaching second grade, but Jean has many friends in her church and the community who help to while away the days of "retirement".
Her 80th birthday is Friday, August 18th, a real celebration of four decades of living and working in the community.
*Jean passed away June 6, 1992.
Oak Harbor News, August 10, 1989
80 Years of Farming Part of Jean Wardenaar's Fulfilling Life
By Dorothy Neil of the News-Times staff
When a young school teacher by the name of Jean Crosby came from teaching in Freeland in 1935 to be the second grade teacher in Oak Harbor, little did she know that she would spend the rest of her life on North Whidbey.
It was in the "zero" days of the Great Depression; Oak Harbor was a small town of fewer than 500, and the school district was very strict about their teachers' behavior. The letter Jean Crosby received from the school board said:
"At a special meeting of the school board you were elected to teach the second grade for next year. We are to pay $85 per month for a nine month period. We are asking all teachers who care to remain in our system to try to go to summer school as often as possible. We are going to pay according to the schooling or preparation a teacher possesses."
The letter continued with "We are not forbidding our teachers to dance, but we do not rehire them if they are dance crazy. We believe it is better if our teachers mix into community gatherings and attend one of the churches here. Yours for a bigger and better school next year."
Miss Crosby might have had an "in" with the school board because her father, later known as Judge Seth Crosby, a Spanish-American War vet, came to Whidbey Island by canoe in 1892 with his brother George and took a homestead on what is today named "Crosby Road". For a few years in his later years Seth Crosby was Oak Harbor's police judge.
Oak Harbor school teachers of 1935 were not only discouraged from being "dance crazy" but could not be married. There were no men teachers, men were given the administrative posts. And because of the depression when work was scarce, a married teacher had to resign because she had a husband who ostensibly was the bread winner.
When school teacher Jean Crosby met, fell in love, and married Whidbey Islander Jake Wardenaar, Jean and Jake were married in secret at the beginning of the 1935 school year on 13 September, 1935. They kept the secret until the following March and then announced the marriage. She was allowed to finish the school year, then they fired her.
But when the Navy came to North Whidbey in 1941 she was rehired, and taught in the old two-story frame building where the "flat top" building today stands near the stadium in the Navy's Quonset Huts, and at Oak Harbor Elementary and Olympic View.
She taught 47 second grade students in one class when "there weren't enough books to go around." The war-years school district was hard put to provide not only school buildings but books and other materials. They traded the lack of money from the Great Depression to the war years of rationing and lack of materials.
"I loved teaching," she said, "they are little human beings, and it is a privilege to be able to teach. After I retired, I tried substitute teaching, but I didn't like the new way of teaching, so I just quit and retired to the farm."
Jean mentioned that among her first second grade students were Wes Maylor, Rosa and Larry Rip, among many others who still live on Whidbey Island.
Along with Crosby Road, another monument stands to the Crosby family, the little stone house on 400 Avenue East. The small square house is built entirely of smooth beach rocks collected by Jake Wardenaar for his father-in-law, Seth Crosby. The stones were brought in buckets from the beach and all had to be approximately the same size and shape, with the exception of one stone that looked and was shaped like an ice cream cone placed just above the north window. Today the little stone house is a favorite target for artists and photographers.
On the Wardenaar farm in Crescent Harbor, Jean learned to be a farmer's wife, and she and her husband raised a son and a daughter.
Jean Crosby Wardenaar's life was not all confined to teaching and farming. She took photography courses and has a wall full of pictures, mostly of the children, to prove it. She was an avid fisherman, having fished all around Whidbey and in Alaska, as one picture shows Jean holding two King salmon almost as big as she.
Although her teaching days are far behind, children make a point to wave at her from school buses as she takes her morning walk from the Harbor Tower Retirement Center. Her smiling face as she waves back shows the love she still holds for the children.
Jean Crosby Wardenaar's one sorrow is Oak Harbor's "build-up" of commercial areas. She remembers the fields now asphalted that supplied hay and grain for farm animals when North Whidbey was strictly rural.
It is hard to get a lifetime of farming out of one's system, just as it is difficult to forget the years of teaching second grade, but Jean has many friends in her church and the community who help to while away the days of "retirement".
Her 80th birthday is Friday, August 18th, a real celebration of four decades of living and working in the community.
*Jean passed away June 6, 1992.
A Birthday Tribute to Jean
Oak Harbor News, August 10, 1989
80 Years of Farming Part of Jean Wardenaar's Fulfilling Life
By Dorothy Neil of the News-Times staff
When a young school teacher by the name of Jean Crosby came from teaching in Freeland in 1935 to be the second grade teacher in Oak Harbor, little did she know that she would spend the rest of her life on North Whidbey.
It was in the "zero" days of the Great Depression; Oak Harbor was a small town of fewer than 500, and the school district was very strict about their teachers' behavior. The letter Jean Crosby received from the school board said:
"At a special meeting of the school board you were elected to teach the second grade for next year. We are to pay $85 per month for a nine month period. We are asking all teachers who care to remain in our system to try to go to summer school as often as possible. We are going to pay according to the schooling or preparation a teacher possesses."
The letter continued with "We are not forbidding our teachers to dance, but we do not rehire them if they are dance crazy. We believe it is better if our teachers mix into community gatherings and attend one of the churches here. Yours for a bigger and better school next year."
Miss Crosby might have had an "in" with the school board because her father, later known as Judge Seth Crosby, a Spanish-American War vet, came to Whidbey Island by canoe in 1892 with his brother George and took a homestead on what is today named "Crosby Road". For a few years in his later years Seth Crosby was Oak Harbor's police judge.
Oak Harbor school teachers of 1935 were not only discouraged from being "dance crazy" but could not be married. There were no men teachers, men were given the administrative posts. And because of the depression when work was scarce, a married teacher had to resign because she had a husband who ostensibly was the bread winner.
When school teacher Jean Crosby met, fell in love, and married Whidbey Islander Jake Wardenaar, Jean and Jake were married in secret at the beginning of the 1935 school year on 13 September, 1935. They kept the secret until the following March and then announced the marriage. She was allowed to finish the school year, then they fired her.
But when the Navy came to North Whidbey in 1941 she was rehired, and taught in the old two-story frame building where the "flat top" building today stands near the stadium in the Navy's Quonset Huts, and at Oak Harbor Elementary and Olympic View.
She taught 47 second grade students in one class when "there weren't enough books to go around." The war-years school district was hard put to provide not only school buildings but books and other materials. They traded the lack of money from the Great Depression to the war years of rationing and lack of materials.
"I loved teaching," she said, "they are little human beings, and it is a privilege to be able to teach. After I retired, I tried substitute teaching, but I didn't like the new way of teaching, so I just quit and retired to the farm."
Jean mentioned that among her first second grade students were Wes Maylor, Rosa and Larry Rip, among many others who still live on Whidbey Island.
Along with Crosby Road, another monument stands to the Crosby family, the little stone house on 400 Avenue East. The small square house is built entirely of smooth beach rocks collected by Jake Wardenaar for his father-in-law, Seth Crosby. The stones were brought in buckets from the beach and all had to be approximately the same size and shape, with the exception of one stone that looked and was shaped like an ice cream cone placed just above the north window. Today the little stone house is a favorite target for artists and photographers.
On the Wardenaar farm in Crescent Harbor, Jean learned to be a farmer's wife, and she and her husband raised a son and a daughter.
Jean Crosby Wardenaar's life was not all confined to teaching and farming. She took photography courses and has a wall full of pictures, mostly of the children, to prove it. She was an avid fisherman, having fished all around Whidbey and in Alaska, as one picture shows Jean holding two King salmon almost as big as she.
Although her teaching days are far behind, children make a point to wave at her from school buses as she takes her morning walk from the Harbor Tower Retirement Center. Her smiling face as she waves back shows the love she still holds for the children.
Jean Crosby Wardenaar's one sorrow is Oak Harbor's "build-up" of commercial areas. She remembers the fields now asphalted that supplied hay and grain for farm animals when North Whidbey was strictly rural.
It is hard to get a lifetime of farming out of one's system, just as it is difficult to forget the years of teaching second grade, but Jean has many friends in her church and the community who help to while away the days of "retirement".
Her 80th birthday is Friday, August 18th, a real celebration of four decades of living and working in the community.
*Jean passed away June 6, 1992.
Oak Harbor News, August 10, 1989
80 Years of Farming Part of Jean Wardenaar's Fulfilling Life
By Dorothy Neil of the News-Times staff
When a young school teacher by the name of Jean Crosby came from teaching in Freeland in 1935 to be the second grade teacher in Oak Harbor, little did she know that she would spend the rest of her life on North Whidbey.
It was in the "zero" days of the Great Depression; Oak Harbor was a small town of fewer than 500, and the school district was very strict about their teachers' behavior. The letter Jean Crosby received from the school board said:
"At a special meeting of the school board you were elected to teach the second grade for next year. We are to pay $85 per month for a nine month period. We are asking all teachers who care to remain in our system to try to go to summer school as often as possible. We are going to pay according to the schooling or preparation a teacher possesses."
The letter continued with "We are not forbidding our teachers to dance, but we do not rehire them if they are dance crazy. We believe it is better if our teachers mix into community gatherings and attend one of the churches here. Yours for a bigger and better school next year."
Miss Crosby might have had an "in" with the school board because her father, later known as Judge Seth Crosby, a Spanish-American War vet, came to Whidbey Island by canoe in 1892 with his brother George and took a homestead on what is today named "Crosby Road". For a few years in his later years Seth Crosby was Oak Harbor's police judge.
Oak Harbor school teachers of 1935 were not only discouraged from being "dance crazy" but could not be married. There were no men teachers, men were given the administrative posts. And because of the depression when work was scarce, a married teacher had to resign because she had a husband who ostensibly was the bread winner.
When school teacher Jean Crosby met, fell in love, and married Whidbey Islander Jake Wardenaar, Jean and Jake were married in secret at the beginning of the 1935 school year on 13 September, 1935. They kept the secret until the following March and then announced the marriage. She was allowed to finish the school year, then they fired her.
But when the Navy came to North Whidbey in 1941 she was rehired, and taught in the old two-story frame building where the "flat top" building today stands near the stadium in the Navy's Quonset Huts, and at Oak Harbor Elementary and Olympic View.
She taught 47 second grade students in one class when "there weren't enough books to go around." The war-years school district was hard put to provide not only school buildings but books and other materials. They traded the lack of money from the Great Depression to the war years of rationing and lack of materials.
"I loved teaching," she said, "they are little human beings, and it is a privilege to be able to teach. After I retired, I tried substitute teaching, but I didn't like the new way of teaching, so I just quit and retired to the farm."
Jean mentioned that among her first second grade students were Wes Maylor, Rosa and Larry Rip, among many others who still live on Whidbey Island.
Along with Crosby Road, another monument stands to the Crosby family, the little stone house on 400 Avenue East. The small square house is built entirely of smooth beach rocks collected by Jake Wardenaar for his father-in-law, Seth Crosby. The stones were brought in buckets from the beach and all had to be approximately the same size and shape, with the exception of one stone that looked and was shaped like an ice cream cone placed just above the north window. Today the little stone house is a favorite target for artists and photographers.
On the Wardenaar farm in Crescent Harbor, Jean learned to be a farmer's wife, and she and her husband raised a son and a daughter.
Jean Crosby Wardenaar's life was not all confined to teaching and farming. She took photography courses and has a wall full of pictures, mostly of the children, to prove it. She was an avid fisherman, having fished all around Whidbey and in Alaska, as one picture shows Jean holding two King salmon almost as big as she.
Although her teaching days are far behind, children make a point to wave at her from school buses as she takes her morning walk from the Harbor Tower Retirement Center. Her smiling face as she waves back shows the love she still holds for the children.
Jean Crosby Wardenaar's one sorrow is Oak Harbor's "build-up" of commercial areas. She remembers the fields now asphalted that supplied hay and grain for farm animals when North Whidbey was strictly rural.
It is hard to get a lifetime of farming out of one's system, just as it is difficult to forget the years of teaching second grade, but Jean has many friends in her church and the community who help to while away the days of "retirement".
Her 80th birthday is Friday, August 18th, a real celebration of four decades of living and working in the community.
*Jean passed away June 6, 1992.
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