My grandmother, (Lucille) Edna Mulder Zuidweg, graduated from Western Normal School and accepted a job as a teacher in Kent County for the 1931-32 school year.
This contract, pictured above, shows that she was hired on at a salary of Xxxty-five dollars per month. That’s right: Xxx because that portion of the paper document has worn away over the years. Any guesses how much her salary was? $25? $45? $65? $85? It doesn’t look like it was over a hundred. I found a list of salaries in Johnson County, Kentucky, for the same year.
According to these salaries, it’s likely that, as a new teacher, my grandmother could have been hired in at $75 or $85 per month. If anybody has a better idea of salaries in rural Michigan at that time, I’d love to hear it.
When my grandmother started her teaching job, she had already been dating my grandfather, Adrian Zuidweg. They married at the end of the school year, on May 21, 1932, in South Bend, Indiana.
This was very nice. Where did you get pic and contract?
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From grandma’s scrapbook. Thanks for reading. 🙂
Fascinating artifacts!! I love stuff like that.
Thanks for reading, WJ! There will be more to come in the future. To add to my other goodies, my mother gave me my grandmother’s high school graduation scrapbook, which is where I found this document and photo.
[…] « Edna Mulder’s Teacher Contract 1931-32 […]
[…] when she worked Christmas season at the J.C. Penney,in the basement of the downtown store. In an earlier post, I wrote about Grandma working as a teacher her first year out of college, but then she gotten […]
Luanne, you stated in an article of your writings as to when Henry Waruf was born and his death, you stated 1960 for his death, that may have been Carrie’s death, but Henry died December of 1945, I have his death notice from the newspaper if your interested in it. All my best, Paula
[…] I’ve written posts about my grandmother. Dorothy showed up a bit, too, because the girls graduated high school together. You can read about their graduation here and here and here. In this post, Grandma, Dorothy, and Vena are shown as children with their parents and one brother (again, the youngest had not yet been born). Grandma’s teaching contract from 1931 can be found here. […]