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A Legacy Created at Highland Springs School

While she was at Highland Springs, Mrs. Bonnet designed the "Highlander" who graced the front of the school annuals and was blazoned on the school rings. The first one used was a Highlander in a Tam o' Shanter (a woolen cap of Scottish origin with a tight headband, wide flat circular crown, and usually a pompon in the center). A copy of him is shown on this page, from the 1927 Yearbook. He lasted for a while and then in 1929 the school’s Highlander graduated into a representation of a more formally dressed Scotsman.

Drawing Scotsmen was not all “Mommie Bonnet”—as she became known—did for Highland Springs. It was she who introduced the idea of an annual operetta to be presented by the school. There were many of those operettas. She had as assistants Miss Elaine Royall Scott and Miss Thelma Bagley Keene. Mother also directed the Junior-Senior Play (with help from the same teachers), trained the Glee Club, and trained the actors in one-act plays, sometimes taking them to Charlottesville to compete in the State contests.

For years she spent summer hours juggling cards on which rising Seniors had listed the subjects they wished to take in their last year. Mother tried valiantly to arrange a schedule to suit the largest number of Seniors possible.

Loving Guidance

She spent many evening hours at the school office working with parents. I have met, in retirement, a woman who remembers that her father brought her two unruly brothers to Mrs. Bonnet many evenings to discuss how his boys could become better school citizens.

The school was on the streetcar line between Richmond and Seven Pines. Students, often without permission from their parents or the school, would take the streetcar into the city. The worried parents would call the school to know where their children were. Many nights—sometimes until the last streetcar that ran at midnight—Mrs. Bonnet met every streetcar returning from the city to see to it that those errant students were returned to their parents safely.

In the high school, she started the Citizens’ Association, which, as its name suggests, sponsored good citizenship and a clean school, and promoted students helping families in the neighborhood. She introduced a course for boys that, similar to home economics for girls, taught homemaking the boys could use in later life. A small frame building like a home was built on the grounds for those classes.

Mrs. Bonnet attended all basketball games and tried to teach the student body and the neighborhood that it was un-sportsmanlike to cheer when the opposing team made a mistake—a stand few today would understand. She was a leader, a coordinator, a disciplinarian, and a stickler for fairness.

An Exuberant Class of 1932

My own class (1932) was one so full of excellent people that it was credited as being the class that had so many leaders we couldn’t choose class officers. But with this came exuberance. During our years in high school, we had only two teachers that couldn’t handle us in their classes. One was an incompetent male math teacher. The other was a fine female history teacher who knew her subject well. But, being young and inexperienced, she was unable to keep order while trying to impart to us the wonders that she knew.

When we misbehaved in the math class, Mommie Bonnet came into the room, removed the teacher, and then scolded our class roundly. She took over the class and taught us the math we needed. She sent this math teacher straight downtown to the Superintendent, and we never saw him again. When Mother had to come to quiet us in the room of the knowledgeable but inexperienced young history teacher, the teacher was asked to step into the hall. The door was closed. All Mrs. Bonnet said to us was, “Aren’t you Seniors ashamed of yourselves!” She stood there a few minutes, looking disappointed in us. Then she let the teacher back in. There was never again a speck of trouble in that teacher’s history class.

Another Challenge for the Principalship

In the spring of 1943 there was another bid to take the job away from a woman. There were by that time many more men in the teaching profession than there had been in the earlier years. Claiming that a woman was holding a man’s position, the new contender pressed his case for the Principalship. My father was no longer around to argue against my mother giving in to the pressure, and she decided to leave Highland Springs, and to let the ambitious fellow have the job he wanted. She was allowed to transfer from the Principalship of Highland Springs High School to an Associate Principalship at Glen Allen High School in another part of Henrico County.

The County School Board honored Mommie Bonnet with a Resolution, which commended her most highly. I have in my possession a sheet of unruled paper on which several teachers and many students and alumni of Highland Springs on that occasion signed the sentiment, “We miss you, Mommie Bonnet.”

Mother went to Glen Allen School in the fall of 1943 and enjoyed seven years working there with Mr. George H. Moody, the Principal. In the spring of 1950, nearing age 65, she decided to retire. My husband, Herbert, and I had asked Mother to come live with us and help with her grandchildren. It would be better, we argued, to retire while the powers were still clamoring for her to remain than to someday miss signs that she had overstayed her time. After deep consideration, she agreed to come to Charlotte Court House, Virginia, to live with us. There are letters from the Henrico County School System asking her to remain at Glen Allen School:

A March, 1950, letter on Henrico County Public Schools stationery and signed by Clyde K. Holsinger, the Henrico County Superintendent, says “I am very sorry I could not place your name before the School Board for reappointment. I feel you are too young and efficient to deprive us of your valued services.”

Early Life

Because Mother never mentioned herself and did not put any pictures of herself in the scrapbook which she made, I thought it fitting that I should put in this article, something about her childhood, her education, and how she got into teaching in the first place.

As Marjorie Booth, fourth child of Henry Judson and Margaret Iva Coney Booth, my mother was born on the 8th of July 1885, in Columbus, Ohio. At the age of two she developed tuberculosis which settled in her left ankle. The doctors called it “a tubercular ankle”. She was in Mt. Carmel Hospital in Columbus for many months and no one in the family was allowed in her room with her for most of the time she was there.

She used to tell me that she remembered how her mother would sit for hours in a chair outside her hospital room and peek at her through the crack between the door and the jamb. Mother had a decided limp for the rest of her life, her left leg being much smaller in diameter than the right.

Little Marjorie finally got well enough to go home. Her parents and doctors thought it well to have her spend some time in the mountains, commonly thought in those days the very best cure for tuberculosis. Her father was a busy attorney in Columbus, at one time in the State Legislature. He was able to afford to send the child for the mountain cure.

Her mother took her to board in someone’s home in the New York Adirondack Mountains. While they were there the heavy brace for her leg broke and the doctor recommended that she try walking without a brace. That worked and she never wore a brace again. Later she went with her mother for a short stay in New Orleans before coming back to Columbus permanently. At that time the Booth family was living on 15th Avenue in Columbus, not far from Ohio State University.

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