Margaret Sinclair Hofstetter

Margaret and her parents, Monroe and Grace

 

Picture at right is probably her high school graduation photo

Margaret was born May 11, 1908, attended Jenny Lind School, Linden High School because it was much nearer to Jenny Lind than Calaveras High School, and lastly, San Jose State Normal School. A Normal School was what Teachers Colleges were called in those days and that institution was later named San Jose State College, and is now San Jose State University.

Margaret taught in a number of schools in Calaveras and San Joaquin Counties, including Murphys, Evergreen, Jenny Lind, Valley Springs, Linden, Chartville, and a school down on the Calaveras River near the Escalon Bellota Road whose name I think was Douglas School.

Her first teaching assignment was in Murphys where her father had taught and where I was to teach early in my career. She fell in love with the proprietor of the local card room, my father, and was advised by the trustees to distance herself from that scalawag, or face being dismissed from service at the Murphys School.

She chose my father as the reader may have guessed.
She had been raised by very religious parents as anyone reading about Monroe, her father, would already know. She now had some money, a new Ford Model A, and independence. Among my mother's collection of letters is one from an 8th grade girl, Annabel Redding, whose father also happened to be the Principal at Murphys School. The letter was written by Annabel shortly after the new school term had begun with my mother being gone. She told my mother that all the girls had admired and looked up to her because she was so independent, had her own new car, had wonderful clothes, and was so beautiful. All quite true, but soon to change, because the depression was just hitting our country, and my father was not really gainfully employed.
Regardless, my father's "wicked" ways appealed to her enough that she married him in a Nevada ceremony, which must have shaken her parents to the quick.

Shortly after I was born in 1933,we moved to Jenny Lind where we lived in an old dredge company house now long gone. When my Grandfather, Monroe, was killed in 1936, my Grandmother and Uncle moved to Stockton and we moved into their house, the one where Margaret was raised. Elsewhere in this site you can determine that most of my early years were in a time when my mother was teaching at Jenny Lind. However, she would leave for another school and then come back to Jenny Lind. This was a very common practice at that time and must have been the only way teachers could persuade trustees to give them a raise. I can remember my mother being extremely happy because the Linden Trustees had raised her salary to $1400 for the upcoming school year.

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E-mail: hofs@goldrush.com