LOOKING BACK
Retired teacher shares her story.
Mary McIntyre never thinks about how long it’s been since she taught school but sometimes she gets a reminder.
A few years ago she was standing in line at a grocery store when the man behind her introduced himself as a former student.
“He had a little boy with him and I asked if it was his son. He said, ‘No that’s my grandson,’” she said. “What does that tell you?”
McIntyre, 96, taught school for close to 40 years and retired in the late 1970s.
She is proud of many accomplishments but foremost is the time she spent as a primary teacher.
“They told me there was something special inside a primary teacher and that I had it,” she said. “But to me it was because I loved it.”
McIntyre will be the guest speaker at the monthly meeting of the Glace Bay Historical Society on Monday at 7 p.m. at the Old Town Hall, 14 McKeen St., Glace Bay. Lunch will be served and everyone is welcome.
McIntyre has many stories to tell beginning in 1940 when she attended teachers’ college in Truro and was travelling home for the Christmas holidays.
McIntyre said she took the train to the Strait of Canso where it was dismantled and put on the ferry.
“The ferry would cross then the train would be put back together again and you’d go back on your merry way.”
On her return trip she remembers the weather changing and strong winds filling the Strait of Canso with ice.
“We sat that night in a train car on the boat in the middle
of the Strait of Canso,” she said. “We got to school late and it occurred to me the professors would think, ‘Well they couldn’t make that one up.’”
McIntyre was 21 years old when she first began teaching in a one-room school in Louisbourg with from 20-30 children in Grades Primary-9.
She remembers how much she loved Louisbourg and how nice the people were to her. Her salary was about $350 for the year.
“We had to board in these places of course,” she said. “I’d come back to Glace Bay every Saturday morning on the S&L.”
McIntyre then taught in Dutch Brook for a year before going to Glace Bay where she taught at the Sterling school for about four years and then at St. John School.
It was at St. John’s that she began teaching Grade Primary and stayed with it throughout the remainder of her career.
She said the girls and boys were separated into different classes.
“I think it was because of the size of the classes.”
She said it wasn’t unusual to have upwards of 40 students.
McIntyre had the boy’s class for years and she loved the innocence of the age.
“One day a little boy put his hand up and said, ‘Teacher do you live in a house?’
“When they left school I was
there in the classroom and when they’d arrive the next day I was in the classroom,” she said. “That’s where they thought I lived.”
Most of McIntyre’s teaching career was in Glace Bay and area followed by two years in Alberta and one year in Vancouver.
The biggest difference McIntyre saw throughout her career was a lack of parent involvement
in the Cape Breton schools at that time.
“Here historically parents stayed away from the school. Out west you ran into something entirely different, as parents were really involved in the school. The parents could walk into the class anytime at all and stay for a while and they often did.”