Miss Baldwin Was a Teacher...
Gertrude Baldwin's death on June 19, 1946, earned front-page coverage in the Beaumont, Texas, evening newspaper. It was an unusual tribute. She had not belonged to new or old money in this oil and refinery town, had never been elected to civic leadership, and had rarely seen her name in print. But as the Beaumont Journal reported that day, Miss Baldwin was special, "one of the best known and beloved teachers" in the city school system and "a guiding spirit" within Beaumont's growing Mexican community.
One could say she got off on the wrong foot early in her career. Beaumont teachers who remained in the profession stayed put in an originally assigned grade level, or they moved on to administration. A select few advanced to the faculty of nearby Lamar Junior College, which offered teacher-preparation programs. Miss Baldwin moved in the opposite direction. After completing a B.A. with a Spanish major at Mary Hardin-Baylor College in 1923, she took a position at the high school in Port Arthur, a smaller town just down the road from Beaumont toward the Gulf of Mexico. She had attended high school in Beaumont, and her family still lived there. In 1927, her father died, and as the unmarried daughter, she moved back home to live with her mother. Among the vacant teaching positions available to her was one in a 1st grade classroom of Fletcher School. Since she held a permanent high school license, Texas' most prestigious teaching credential, the opportunity offered a mixed blessing at best, but she took it. The downward shift forced her to complete courses in elementary school methods and to accept a reduction in salary.
The Fletcher School principal might well have entertained reservations about her new teacher. This tall, slender woman reportedly held herself in reserve, yet spoke bluntly, and lacked professional experience below the secondary level. Education set her further apart from colleagues. As elementary teachers, they needed just two years of postsecondary preparation, a bar typically passed at Lamar Junior College. They tended to start young, many as teenagers. Miss Baldwin was 33 years old. More worrisome, in 1927 (and for several years thereafter) she alone among Beaumont's approximately 80 elementary school teachers...
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