Salinas Junior College - La Reata Yearbook (Salinas, CA)

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Rarely has one the privilege of interviewing a person of such broad culture and rich experience as our beloved librarian, Mrs. Florence Y. Humphries. We are grateful, therefore, to submit here the result of a chat graciously granted by one grand woman — who is just as vigorous and up-to-the-minute as you or I. In past years giving a little talk to the high school juniors about the celebrated people whose lives have in some degree touched mine, I usually began with that famiHar story about the woman who didn ' t know Wash- ington Irving herself, but had walked out of church behind a woman that had a cousin that had seen him! Perhaps this is typical of my contacts with the great and the near-great. In the first place I was fortunate in my parents. Many of my father ' s friends were well-known, among whom I remember R. M. Bishop, Gover- nor of Ohio ; C. O. Bowman, Regent of Kentucky University; and James A. Garfield, later President of the United States, whom my father closely resembled so that they were frequently mistaken for each other. We spent a happy summer once in Kentucky at Regent Bowman ' s beautiful place, formerly the home of Henry Clay. Later it was my father who induced the Remington Manufacturing Company to take up the Sholes and Gliddon Typewriter; I well remember that early machine, cumbrous and unwieldy, attached to a stand, like a sewing-machine, the carriage being moved by a foot-treadle. A little book commemorating the first half century of the Remington Typewriter pays tribute to my father as a most persuasive speaker, whose tongue never tired. My father himself felt that this was his most signal achievement, that he had been instrumental in helping open a new means of livelihood to countless young men and women. My mother, who was in advance of her time, sympa- thized in the work of EHzabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and those other pioneers laboring for the rights of women, took a great interest in public affairs, and was an uncompromising abolitionist. My earliest recollection is of walking with her down the street on that morning of April fifteenth, 1865. I saw her meet a friend, and I noticed that both women were weeping. Fortunately for me my mother had theoi ies about education, and I was taught at home until I was ten, and after that I went to school only part of each year. I started in the third grade, where I spent three months, skipped the fourth, had three months in the fifth, skipped the sixth, had five months in the seventh, and for the first time spent almost the whole Continued on Division Page Book II