George and Lou Haedicke
A family history
Utah, University of Chicago, Arizona
In the 1908-09 school year, Lou taught the 6th, 7th and 8th grades at the New West School in Lehi, Utah. The New West Educational Commission in Boston, MA had established this school.
At the same time Lehi was developing, the Congregational church in Ogden was beginning the development of “gentile” education by that denomination in that city as well as in the rest of Utah.
Gentile education was begun generally for two reasons. First, Gentiles found it totally impossible to send their children to territorial schools. These schools were inadequately financed, and also, since the Mormons controlled the school boards, they were for all intents and purposes Mormon seminaries, making them unacceptable to Gentiles. Second, Gentile education was also begun as a means to wean Mormons away from their church. Approaching the problem as they would in pagan lands, Gentile missionary and educational societies believed that if one could gain control of the minds of Mormon youth through good education, one might win them away from Mormonism.
The New West Education Commission came into being in 1879. In that year at a meeting of the Congregational Ministers Union in Chicago, the attendees heard about the educational needs in Utah. A committee was appointed to investigate the problem. It consulted Col. C. G. Hammond, an executive of the Union Pacific Railroad, who had lived in Utah. Col. Hammond suggested the name of the Commission and gave a thousand dollars to put it into operation. The Commission was assigned the task of building schools in the Utah Territory and in other areas of the Southwest.
Many women were associated with the New West Education Commission. Miss Margaret A. Towne was in charge of the Chicago office and Miss Lucia A. Manning ran the Boston branch. By 1887 out of forty-two teachers working in Utah, thirty-seven were women.
It was thought that highly educated Gentile women, generally unmarried, standing on their own, would serve as worthy examples to Mormon women who reportedly suffered mightily from the rigors of polygamy. Lou Dysinger answered the call.
However, it must have been difficult work in land very foreign to what she had known in Michigan. After a year she left this position and the school year of 1909-10 found her teaching close to home at Memphis High School. Spring of 1910 found her attending graduate school at the University of Chicago. The university has confirmed this fact.
The American Baptist Education Society and oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, who later described the University of Chicago as “the best investment I ever made”, founded the University of Chicago in 1890. Marshall Field, owner of the Chicago department store that bears his name, donated the land for the new university, in the recently annexed suburb of Hyde Park.
Lou attended graduate school at Chicago during a time when only two of 10 adults could read or write. Only 6 percent of all Americans had graduated high school and ninety percent of all physicians had no college education at all. She was 22 years old, an educated, well traveled and accomplished woman.
For the school years of 1910-11 and 1911-12, she was the High School Principal and English teacher at Morenci, AZ. Here she met a miner named George E. Haedicke.