I haven’t actually known many people named June. I always assumed the name was given to girls born in that month, as I’d assumed the names of flowers or birthstones associated with months were bestowed. (It was many years before I discovered that my aunt Opal wasn’t born in October, although I couldn’t imagine why anyone would name a child for the October birthstone if she were born in any other month.)
There was a girl named June in my high school class, although because of the pervading alphabetical order we never shared classes that I can remember. I’ve often wondered how many close friendships, business partners, marriages happened because of people being thrown together due simply to the first letter of their last names.
One of my favorite teachers was named June, and she was actually born on the sixteenth day of that lovely month of 1922. The family moved to southwestern Iowa when she was just a few months old and, as was true of country schools at that time, she started school as a first grade student at age five. By second grade, she was so far advanced over her classmates that she was promoted to third grade after the first few days of the school year. This love of learning continued throughout her school years and she graduated from high school before her sixteenth birthday. She was one of the youngest students enrolled in a newly established self-help junior college in Tabor, Iowa, graduating in May of 1940. Although she had already passed the teachers’ exams, she needed to take twelve hours of Education classes at Simpson College in Indianola. By age eighteen, she was a certified teacher and eager to begin a career in the classroom.
In April of 1941, June’s husband-to-be, Herb Boyd was drafted into the U.S. Army. He had just obtained a job at the Veteran’s Hospital in Knoxville and was assured that the job would still be his when he returned from the war. They were married in 1943 during a brief furlough he was granted before being shipped overseas to England. She did not see him again for two long years, during which he had fought at Utah Beach on D-Day. Eventually, they made their way to Knoxville, Herb resumed his job at the VA Hospital, they bought a house (which June lived in for the rest of her life) and she soon obtained a job teaching in the junior high school.
As a student, she had favored math and English and those, quite naturally, became the subjects she was best at teaching. Young enough to have been an older sister to her students, she seemed to understand and enjoy the company of her adolescent charges. Sensing that, we responded in kind, enjoying the time spent in her classroom and enthusiastically participating in the challenges she put before us. Fractions and percentages became manageable under her guidance, and we began to look forward to the fascinating world of algebra that was still in our future.
June and her husband attended every one of our class reunions, held at five year intervals, and were welcome guests and chaperons at most of the high school dances and other parties until Herb’s death in November of 1999. She continued to come to our reunions and annual spring lunches that we began having during the late 1970’s. She told us, many times, that we had been her favorite class of all the many classes during the years that she taught in Knoxville.
In 2002, I received a letter from her asking if I would do her the favor of editing a book she was writing about her life teaching in Iowa. I was greatly flattered that she should ask (after all, she had taught English classes when I was in junior high school!) She mailed me the manuscript and, while it needed little editing, I knew at once that my classmates would want to read it. I asked her permission to offer copies to any classmates who would want them, and with her approval and their enthusiastic response, printed many paperback copies for them.