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The Education of Elva Killa

A friend passed along a snippet of a story a few weeks ago about a woman from my hometown, Elva Killa, about to celebrate her 100th birthday. I couldn’t get home to Egg Harbor to talk to her, but Giz and Linda Herbst did earlier this month. Their conversation served as a base for this column, a story of a century of perspective on rural education and life.

In the Door County of 1930, going to high school was far from compulsory, especially for farm families. Eighth grade graduation was graduation for many, and often meant that your formal career on the farm began the next morning. As late as the 1970s, high school attendance for farm children was secondary to helping milk the cows, bail hay or pick rocks.

In 1930s in West Jacksonport, Ella Herbst was determined that her three children would go to high school, even if it meant four difficult years for her and her three children.

Elva (Herbst) Killa

Elva (Herbst) Killa

Sevastopol High School didn’t send a school bus to their home on the then-remote Memorial Drive in West Jacksonport, and driving them to and from school each day wasn’t an option for Ella and her husband Louis. Instead, like many rural families of the time, the Herbsts sent eldest daughter Elva to live with the Sevastopol High School principal during the week, where she was a caretaker for the principal’s young daughter in exchange for room and board. Her younger siblings would later take advantage of similar arrangements, with brother Edward living with the school’s agricultural teacher, and sister Irene living with grandparents who lived on the bus route.

“The other kids on the bus would say, ‘don’t talk to Elva, she lives with the principal’,” Killa told Giz and Linda Herbst in an interview Oct. 9.

Elva spent weekdays growing homesick, looking forward to Friday when her father would drive down to pick her and her siblings up to come home for the weekend. This made the trek to school easier than it had been in elementary school, however. The Herbst children walked 2.5 miles to Farview School, always tempted to take shortcuts through fields, but shooed out by disapproving farmers. On harsh winter days their trek was made huddled in blankets on the back of a horse-drawn sleigh.

At her desk, Elva was cursed with what was then considered a terrible handicap. Elva was left-handed. She often came home with a severely black and blue left hand, the result of beatings from her teacher with a ruler, meant to stop her from using her left hand, which in those days was seen as a mark of the devil in some quarters, a habit to be corrected harshly in others. Teachers and parents would go to great measures to wean children from using their left hand, tying it behind their back, scolding children for using it, or in cases like Elva’s, physically beating children for the great misdeed.


 

The Farview School Killa attended in West Jacksonport. Photo courtesy of the Jacksonport Historical Society.

The Farview School Killa attended in West Jacksonport. Photo courtesy of the Jacksonport Historical Society.

The punishment didn’t change her behavior, and when her father caught wind of it, he found the teacher and told her it “was never to happen again.” It didn’t, but Killa said that teacher ignored her from that day on.

But neither that experience, nor a high school spent largely away from home would dissuade Elva or her siblings. Irene would become a nurse, Edward earned a PhD in biochemistry, and Elva earned the highest grade point average in her class. She would not be named valedictorian, however.

The Farview School in West Jacksonport today. Photo courtesy of the Jacksonport Historical Society.

The Farview School in West Jacksonport today. Photo courtesy of the Jacksonport Historical Society.

“Since I was from West Jacksonport, I was not ‘one of them’,” Killa said. She was not from the school’s district boundaries, so they would name her salutatorian instead. “I never told my father this, for fear of the encounter he would have with the Sevastopol administrators.”

Undeterred, she went to nursing school in Milwaukee, becoming the supervising nurse of the medical department at Wisconsin Energy for 30 years. She has traveled to many of the nation’s national parks, traveled through much of Europe and Scandinavia, and climbed the peaks of the Alps. She has loved (she married Sabastian “Bud” Killa in 1980) and lost (Bud died in 1997).

It was no small journey for a girl born in her grandmother’s home in rural West Jacksonport on Nov. 4, 1915. And after her life’s journey took her so far away, she returned to Egg Harbor in 1999, moving into a condominium at Eames Farm overlooking the village only a few miles from her childhood farm.

One wonders what the town looks like from her perch atop the hill, a century of perspective behind her eyes.

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