Hi All,
Connie grace and I had her her first year 1that MRS when we were
juniors. we had her during the 1957-1958 year.
Evelyn
----- Original Message -----
From: Toni <coffey41@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: "msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date sent: Fri, 26 May 2017 08:33:19 -0400
Subject: [msb-alumni] Re: Mis Manning's 90th Birthday Party
Thank you for sharing with us this article Vikie. It brought
back a lot of memories. I bet all of us had her for a teacher.
On May 26, 2017, at 3:21 AM, "Vickie"
<happytraveler1972@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Peggy Wyatt Barnett shared a link to this article on facebook:
Guinevere and Cyclops
Former teacher's 90th birthday stirs tales of Michigan School
for the Blind
BY
LAWRENCE COSENTINO
?
Michigan's School for the Blind closed in the mid-1990s, leaving
a lot of untold
stories.
Not all of the students were completely blind. Many had partial
or peripheral vision
and used this gift shrewdly. They deliberately dropped pencils
in English lit class
so they could bend over and check out Miss Manning's legs.
Alumnus J.J. Jackson flashed a smile after spilling the beans at
a dinner party in
the back of Coral Gables restaurant Thursday.
Seated directly across from Jackson was Ann Manning herself, in a
skirt that barely
covered her knees, celebrating her 90th birthday with a dozen
former students and
colleagues.
The teacher dealt Jackson a quick air kick under the table.
"I still have nice legs," she said. In its heyday from the
1920s to the 1960s, the
Michigan School for the Blind, on Lansing's northwest side,
bustled with nearly 300
students from around the state.
The school held classes in all K-12 subjects, from art to shop to
athletics, until
education for visually and hearing impaired students were
mainstreamed.
Many students lived on campus, adding to a unique camaraderie
that was still obvious
as Manning and her admirers dove into their lasagna and birthday
cake.
Nicknames were a big deal at the school.
Many students and staff had several. One of Miss Manning's was
frosted on her cake.
"We called her Guinevere because she was like Queen Guinevere in
Camelot, so graceful
and light," Jackson said.
The other one we'll get to in a minute. Bill Meyers wrestled at
the school in the
late '60s, just after it snagged Class B wrestling championships
in 1961 and 1963.
Meyers is burly, shaven-headed and gruff - and pushing 70 - but
is still careful
to say "Miss Manning."
"She ran a tight ship," Meyers said. "She knew what she was
doing. She threw me out
in the hall a couple times."
Another wrestler, Jim Oudsema of Holt, attended the school in the
mid-'60s.
"Miss Manning liked her job, and that enthusiasm rubbed off,"
he said. "Her and Joe
were my favorite teachers."
"Joe" is Joe Toth of Okemos, 79, who sat next to Oudsema at the
party. Toth joined
the teaching staff in the fall of 1962, with only two years of
experience in the
classroom.
"Suddenly I'm supposed to know how to teach the blind," he
said.
Grading exams in braille was only part of the challenge.
"I knew nothing," he said. "I learned it all on the job."
He and Manning got along well, even though he was a
liberal-leaning government teacher
and she had a religious, conservative worldview. (Toth grew a
beard in the mid- '60s
and almost got fired for it.)
"Remarkable lady, professional in all respects," Toth said of
his former colleague.
"She provided a lot of motherly advice to these kids - what's
the term? In loco parentis."
Toth had a blast wrestling with the students, but he never got
the best of Oudsema.
"Jim - he was a 127 pounder, and pound for pound - he used to
mop the floor with
me," Toth said.
Toth waved at another former School for the Blind student, Larry
Powell, further
down the table.
"Larry, who was about 20 pounds more - I could do better with
him."
Powell, a retired teacher and wrestling coach, went to the school
from 1962 to 1964,
the school's wrestling glory years. His class was a "rowdy"
group of 10 boys and
one girl.
"Miss Manning had our number," Powell said. "She knew what we
were thinking before
we were thinking it."
While reading Homer's "Odyssey," one of Powell's classmates
dubbed Manning "Old One
Eye," after the Cyclops, because of her watchful gaze.
"She understood we weren't bad kids, just goofy," he said.
"We had every type of
character, but she rolled with it. Some teachers would have had
a real problem with
us."
There's a reason Manning dealt so well with willful kids. It
takes one to know one.
In a brief quiet spell between birthday wishes, Manning proudly
called herself a
"kindergarten dropout."
After four weeks of kindergarten at Bingham Elementary on
Lansing's east side, where
Manning grew up, she persuaded her parents to pull her from
school.
"I couldn't stand sleeping on those rugs when I had a good bed
at home I could take
a nap on," she said. "And holding hands with a stranger to
take a walk - that wasn't
my idea of an education."
She went to Nazareth College in Kalamazoo, liked the teachers
there and decided that
career was for her. She taught stenography and English at a
nursing school in Kankakee,
Ill., and came back to Lansing to attend special education
classes at MSU. The superintendent
of the School for the Blind offered her a job.
"I snapped it up," she said. "I knew it would be a
challenge."
Manning's most famous student was Motown icon Stevie Wonder, who
had just hit it
big with "Fingertips" when he enrolled in the School for the
Blind in 1963.
J.J. Jackson became close friends with Wonder. The two are
still in frequent touch.
Jackson credits Manning with keeping Wonder in school despite a
relentless touring
schedule.
"He was a good student," Manning said. Getting an education
when a 600-page Braille
book takes up the better part of a tabletop is not easy. If you
are a touring Motown
sensation, the difficulties are almost insurmountable.
"The Detroit schools told him he had to choose to either be a
student or pursue his
musician dreams," Jackson said. "He was told he could not have
both."
Working with a traveling tutor, Manning got approval from the
school superintendent
and worked out a curriculum that focused on one subject at a
time.
"That's how we got him through high school," Manning said.
Manning's whip-cracking wrist is still in trim. When Jackson
told Manning he is working
on a book about his friendship with Wonder, she asked him when it
would be finished.
Pleading computer problems, he told her it had taken him eight
months just to get
to Chapter 7.
Manning cocked an eye and told Jackson she'd heard he had a
ghostwriter helping him.
"Sounds like he's more ghost than writer," she cracked.
Jackson enrolled in the school in kindergarten in 1955, after an
operation to correct
a cleft palate went wrong, causing him to become blind. He
graduated in 1968 and
went on to a successful career as an academic at MSU, executive
for Amoco and advocate
for the disabled.
"She gave her students so much love and confidence, and that's
why we were able to
go on in our adult life and do so well," Jackson said.
Meanwhile, a kindly-looking woman with a white cane sidled
between the tables to
greet Manning. Alumna Henrietta Brewer got the nickname
"Hickory" at the school,
although she doesn't remember why.
On her first day at the School for the Blind, she fell in love
with another student,
Dan Brewer. They were in eighth grade. He squinted at her from
across the room, owing
to his sensitivity to light.
"It looked like he was smiling at me, and I decided he was,"
Brewer said.
They were married for 47 years and had four kids. He died in
2014.
Henrietta said her husband was a kind, generous man, owing
largely to "an MSB upbringing."
Manning spotted an opening for one more quip.
"That stands for My Sight is Bad," Old One-Eye said.
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