She never wrote to John Wayne directly. She wrote once to the agency, a short letter thanking them and asking that the thanks be passed along. The letter came back unopened with a handwritten note from a secretary. It said, “Mr. Wayne asked that I return this. He says the account is settled and no further correspondence is necessary.
” Edna Marsh lived in the house in Elko until 1984. She was 82 years old when she died. She had been tutoring children in that house until the previous spring. Her former students, the ones who were still alive and still in Elko County, gathered at the house after she died. They had known each other since the Basin schoolroom.
Some of them had not seen each other in 20 years. They sat in the small house and talked about what they remembered of the room, and the blackboard, and the wood stove in the corner, and the spelling words, and the woman who had written their names on a piece of paper on their last day, and said something true and specific about who they were.
One of them, a woman named Patricia Halverson, who had been in Edna’s first class in 1929 as a 5-year-old and was now 73 years old, organized a small collection among the former students. They established a scholarship in Edna’s name at the Great Basin College in Elko for first-generation students from ranching families in Elko County.
The scholarship was funded at $500 a year from the collection, supplemented over the following decade by additional donations until it reached $1,200 a year. Patricia donated three items to the Northeastern Nevada Museum on Idaho Street in Elko in 1985. The first was the last of Edna Marsh’s grade books, the one covering 1958 to 1961, in which every student’s name was written in the same careful hand with attendance records and arithmetic scores and short descriptive notes in the margin beside each name. The second was the slip of paper from Edna’s last day at the school, the one with Patricia’s own name on it and the sentence Edna had written for her, laminated by then. The paper still pale green from the carbon of the schoolhouse kitchen. Patricia’s sentence read,
“You have always known which questions matter. Keep asking them.” The third was a single page torn from a small notebook with a Beverly Hills address written on it and a monthly figure beside it and no name at the top or bottom. The handwriting was not Edna’s. The display case is in the East Gallery of the Northeastern Nevada Museum.
The placard reads, “Edna Louise Marsh, 1902 to 1984, teacher, Arroyo Basin School, Elko County, Nevada, 1929 to 1961, 31 years, one room, 114 students, no pension. These items were donated by her students who have not forgotten. If this story reached you, pass it on. Share it with a veteran in your life.
Hit that subscribe button if you haven’t already. There are more stories coming and unfortunately, they don’t make men like John Wayne anymore. She brought back two cups and sat at her desk. He asked her why the school was closing. She told him about the enrollment threshold. She told him about the consolidation vote.
He asked about the pension and she told him about that too. She did not editorialize. She gave him the facts the way she gave students a problem on the board. Here is what happened. Here is what it means. Here is where I am. He drank the coffee. He looked at the grade books in the crate visible under the desk beside her.
He asked her what would happen to her. She looked at the grade books. She had written to a cousin in Cedar City who had a room. She was not sure yet. The arithmetic was not working out the way she needed it to. He set the coffee cup down on the student desk which was small for him. He looked at the blackboard again at the spelling words and the long division problem and the patient cursive sentence.
“How many children have you taught in this room?” he said. She looked at the grade books. She had counted once years back. 112 through 1958. More since. He looked out at the basin through the schoolhouse window. 112 children. Ranch children mostly. The children of men who ran cattle and fixed windmills and pulled calves in the cold and sent their kids 14 miles down a gravel track to sit in a stone room and learn to read and do long division from a woman who had come from Utah in 1929 and had never left. He had been playing those men his whole career. He knew what they owed and he knew what they did not always know they owed. Where are you watching from? Drop your state in the comments below. I want to see how far this story
reaches. He took the long brown leather wallet from his jacket pocket. He put it on the student desk. He did not open it. He said, “There is a thing the state of Nevada should be paying you every month. They are not going to pay it. I would like to.” Edna Marsh looked at the wallet on the desk. She looked at him.
She said, “I don’t take charity from strangers.” He said, “I am not a stranger to this kind of country or the people in it. A hundred and twelve children learn to read in this room.” he said. “Some of them are running the ranches their fathers ran. Some of them went further. None of it happens without the woman who ran this school for 31 years.
That has a value and it ought to have a number.” She looked at the wallet. She looked at the blackboard. She said, “I do not know you.” He told her his name. She looked at him. Then she looked at the grade books in the crate. She said, “My students would know that name.” She said it not as a compliment and not as a complaint.
She said it as a fact. He said, “Then let their teacher accept what their teacher is owed.” He wrote his agent’s address on a page from the notebook, a monthly figure beside it, and told her the first payment would arrive within the week. He set the page on her desk. He put the wallet back in his jacket and picked up his hat.
He said, “Stay through the end of term. Teach the last weeks the way you have taught every week before them. The children deserve that and so do you.” He walked back to the truck across the basin floor in the failing light, drove north to the highway, and did not look back. Edna Marsh taught through the last day of the spring term in 1961.
She taught every day the way she had taught every other day, the reading and the arithmetic and the history and the handwriting. On the last day, she gave each of the 14 children a piece of paper with their name on it and a sentence she had written for each one, different for each child, that said something true and specific about who that child was and what she had seen in them over the years she had known them.
She had done this every year for 31 years with every student who left the school. She had started it in 1930 and had not stopped. She moved to the cousin’s house in Cedar City in June of 1961. She did not stay long. The monthly payment from the Beverly Hills agency arrived the first week of every month as Wayne had said it would.
The amount was enough. She rented a small house in Elko in the fall of 1961, three blocks from the public library, and she lived there. She tutored the ranch children whose families drove into Elko from the basin on Saturdays for supplies. She charged nothing for the tutoring. The payment from Beverly Hills covered what she needed.
The letter was four sentences. It informed her the school would close at the end of the current term. It thanked her for her service. It noted that her Utah certificate did not meet current Nevada certification standards and therefore did not qualify her for pension benefits under the district retirement program. It wished her well.
Edna Marsh read the letter at the kitchen table in the small house behind the school. She read it twice. She set it on the table. She looked out the window at the basin, which was long and pale and still in the September light. She was 58 years old. She had $210 in a savings account at the Elko bank.
She had the furniture in the rooms, which was not worth much, and the clothes in the closet, and the 31 years of grade books she kept in a wooden crate under the bed, and the lesson plans filed in a cabinet in the schoolhouse, and nothing else. She had known the school would close eventually. The enrollment had been dropping for 3 years as ranch families moved closer to town.
She had not expected the pension problem. She had not known about the pension problem. She sat at the kitchen table a long time. Then she went into the schoolhouse and began sorting through the lesson plans. John Wayne was 53 years old in October of 1960. He had been location scouting in the basin country south of Elko with a small advanced crew, riding the roads in a rented truck, and looking at the light on the rock faces and making notes about access and water.
The advanced crew had returned to the highway an hour earlier. Wayne had taken a different road back, the kind of thing a man does when he is not ready to stop looking at the country. The truck began running hot on a gravel track in the basin bottom. He pulled off, checked the gauge, let it sit, and looked at the basin.
14 miles of open country in every direction. The light going gold on the east-facing slope. One building visible on the gravel track ahead, a pale stone structure with a wood smoke thread coming from a chimney and a light in the window. He took the empty water can from behind the seat and walked to the building.
He knocked on the schoolhouse door. A woman answered it. She was carrying a cardboard box with both arms. She was 58 years old, plain-faced, gray-haired, wearing a canvas work jacket over a plain dress, reading glasses pushed up on her forehead. She looked at him the way a woman looks at an unexpected visitor when she is in the middle of something she has no reason to stop.
He told her about the truck. He asked if she had water for the radiator. She set the box down on the step and went around the back of the building and came back with a 5-gallon can and handed it to him without ceremony. He thanked her. He looked at the box on the step, the papers inside it visible, the edge of a grade book showing at the corner.
“Moving,” he said. She looked at the box. “At the end of term,” she said. She said it without inflection, the way a woman says a thing she has already finished being upset about. He came back with the empty can 20 minutes later, and she was still on the step sorting through the box. He set the can beside the door.
He asked her if there was a store nearby where he could buy her a replacement can of coolant. “There is not,” she said. He said he would send one from Elko, and took out a small notebook for the address. He looked at the schoolhouse. He asked how long she had been at this school. She told him. “31 years.” He looked at the building, then the basin, then her.
He asked if he could sit on the step for a moment while the truck finished cooling. She looked at him. She said, “There is coffee inside.” He sat at one of the student desks in the front row while she made coffee in the small kitchen at the back of the room. He looked at the blackboard. A long division problem was still written in the upper left corner.
Beside it, in smaller letters, a list of spelling words. Beneath those, a sentence in careful cursive, a handwriting exercise. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The letters were even and patient. They had been written by a woman who had written that sentence on that board, or one like it, many hundreds of times.
The truck that John Wayne was driving overheated on a dirt road 14 miles south of the Nevada highway in the late afternoon of a day in October 1960. And while he was waiting for the engine to cool, he walked to the only building visible in the basin, a one-room schoolhouse at the end of a gravel track, because he needed water for the radiator and he could see a light on inside.
Edna Marsh answered the door with a cardboard box in her arms and 31 years of lesson plans stacked on the desk behind her. Here is the story. The Arroyo Basin school sat at the end of a gravel track on the eastern slope of a long, shallow basin in Elko County, Nevada, 14 miles from the nearest paved highway and 22 miles from the county seat.
It was a single room, 30 ft by 20, built in 1921 from local stone and timber by the three ranching families whose children would use it. The roof had been replaced twice. The wood stove in the northeast corner was the original. The blackboard ran the full length of the south wall and was the best blackboard in the county because the family that donated it had ordered it from a school supply catalog in San Francisco in 1924 and paid the freight themselves.
There were 14 desks arranged in four rows, and on any given school day between eight and 14 children sat in them, depending on the weather and the calving season. Edna Marsh arrived at the Arroyo Basin School in September of 1929. She was 27 years old, a graduate of the Utah State Normal School in Cedar City, class of 1926, with a teaching certificate signed by the State Superintendent of Public Instruction of Utah.
She had taught for 3 years at a two-room school in Millard County, Utah, before a cousin who ran cattle in Elko County wrote her a letter saying the Basin School needed a teacher and the pay was better and the country was worth seeing. She came in the fall and looked at the country and decided the cousin was right on both counts. She had never left.
She taught every grade from first through eighth in the same room for 31 years. She taught reading with McGuffey primers and later with whatever the county library sent out in the bookmobile twice a year. She taught arithmetic on the blackboard and history from a set of textbooks donated by a Reno school district in 1938 when they bought newer ones.
She taught the children of the Halvorson family and the Benedetti family and the Garvey family. And in some years, when the bus from the highway brought in families from farther out, she taught their children, too. She taught the same children for 8 years in the same room, which meant she knew every one of them the way a teacher only knows a student when there is enough time and enough quiet to actually see them.
She never married. She lived in the two-room house attached to the rear of the schoolhouse that the county provided as part of her compensation. She had lived there for 31 years. The county owned it. In Nevada, a teacher’s pension was administered by the Nevada State Teachers Retirement System established in 1947.
To qualify, a teacher was required to hold a valid Nevada teaching certificate. Edna Marsh held a Utah teaching certificate issued in 1926. In 1948, Nevada updated its certification requirements. A teacher holding an out-of-state certificate issued before 1930 was required to sit a Nevada equivalency examination to maintain standing.
The notice about the examination had been sent to the school districts. The Elko County District had filed it. Nobody had told Edna Marsh. She had not known about the examination. She had not sat it. Her Utah certificate had been valid when she arrived, and she had seen no reason to question it since.
The Elko County School Board voted in September of 1960 to consolidate the Arroyo Basin School with the Elko Valley Elementary School, in accordance with a new Nevada statute requiring a minimum enrollment of 12 students per school to qualify for county operating funds. The Arroyo Basin School had 14 students.
Two of them, the youngest Halverson children, would age out of the district at the end of the year. The board had looked at the projected enrollment and found it wanting. The letter went to Edna Marsh on a Friday.
