High school reunions relentlessly remind us that old age has no master. Most ex-teachers are long-gone-dead and buried by this time. Many we shall never forget. Some we knew only by formal address: Coach Jacobs, Mrs. Gardner. Others we recall from a distinctive nickname: Zeke, Stoney, Buggy.
The 1940 Tyrone Bell Telephone Directory listed a resident at 230 E. 12th St. as one, J. Wertz. For all who knew, or knew of, J. Wertz, this ordinary entry in a small-town phone book belied the “stuff” from which true legends are made. Whether known formally as Jeanette or Jeannetta (I had heard it both ways), to her face she always was “Miss Wertz.” Over the years since her passing, fondly I think of her always in the highest regard as “Nettie Wertz.”
The Wertz Girls
The late Miss Wertz and her two, also late, sisters were extremely fine ladies. Our families — Wertz and Hamor — were friends and neighbors for many years, living atop Brewery Hill on opposite sides of East 12th St. As my “personal protector” when I was three or four years of age, Nettie regularly would scoop me up from the middle of Woodland Ave., at the top of Brewery Hill, a spot where I would occasionally wander to sit and direct oncoming local auto traffic bearing down on me from all directions. Nettie told me this story at a family funeral in 1963.
Most folks in the neighborhood referred to Nettie and her sisters as “The Wertz Girls.” The “girls” were a close-knit group. In my memory of the late 1930s and early 1940s, during my early school days, they were moderately up in years. Their collective worlds consisted of church and Sunday school, tons of hair piled high on the head with a bun in the back, and old-maidish attire that included, in Nettie’s case, a locket watch pinned to the lapel of her dress.
Third Grade at Logan School
Nettie was, I think, the self-designated, official Wertz family spokesperson. She taught third grade at Logan School when I was eight years old. As I recall, she taught music, arithmetic, and probably other subjects as required. At various times, Nettie also taught my brothers and me at the First English Lutheran Church Sunday School. During her teaching career, she had instructed many from my family.
Miss Wertz was a saint who, five days a week, turned teaching into a mental “contact sport.” Her methods ran the gamut from kindness to severe, at times projected to her students in the manner of a normal parent’s “tough love,” always offered, I know, from her dedicated, inner compassion intended to instill a personal seal of excellence into each third grader fortunate enough to receive the least shred of knowledge she ever knew to impart. On her agenda, no child was lost or ever left behind. Miss Wertz saw to it.
Nettie started every class with a flip of her lapel watch, then followed that by a blast on her pitch-pipe and a morning song. My brother Ed recalls (nostalgically) that a good, thick sweatshirt was a handy item in Nettie’s class, particularly on a day when one was “sentenced” to her blackboard to demonstrate one’s particular prowess in simple arithmetic. The shirt protected nicely against Nettie’s whack-on-the-back-eraser attack as she persuaded her charges to know that twelve plus three always equaled fifteen, and nothing else. A few nervous types had trouble holding on to the chalk.
For some of the guys, her tactics were a sort of precursor to Coach LaPorte’s head-on-tackle football drills, which would come six or seven years later in high school. Looking back, my first impression is to know that “Miss Wertz scared the hell out of me.” Through all of her teaching years I’m sure she got the job done every time.
Fifty Years at Sunday School
Miss Jeannetta Wertz also is remembered for celebrating fifty years teaching Sunday school at the First English Lutheran Church of Tyrone, alongside other long-serving teachers Carl Fisher, Thelma Wertz, Florence Shaffer, and Clarence Hambright.
I doubt that Miss Wertz ever gained her just respect from any former student until at least thirty-five years past third grade. It is regrettable that this true pioneer of modern education cannot be with us today. Yet it is encouraging to realize that Nettie’s unfailing demand for early classroom excellence is still with us.
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