By CHARLYNE BERENS
Alumni News editor
Bud Pagel remembers Becky Kruse as the woman who “wrote the best used toothbrush story ever.” Someday, people may remember her for a more complex writing project.
Becky Kruse Gjendem is working on a book about her father’s experiences as a fifth grade teacher during the first years of court-ordered school integration in Thomasville, Ga., from 1970-72. Despite the tensions of the times, Gjendem says her father, Don Kruse, enjoyed his years in Georgia. She has set out to discover what his students and fellow teachers are doing now, nearly 30 years later, and how they remember those days of radical change.
Gjendem, who graduated in 1993, was a student in Pagel’s advanced reporting class when she wrote the used toothbrush story for The Journalist, the college’s laboratory newspaper. She did a good reporting and writing job, and the result was “just a hoot,” Pagel says. “It’s an example of how someone skilled and creative can make a story out of anything.”
Gjendem took her skills to the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, S.D., after graduation, working as a copy editor there for a year and a half. When she and her husband, Trond, moved to Tallahassee, Fla., in 1994, she began working for Today’s FDA, the monthly journal of the Florida Dental Association, first as a staff writer and later as associate editor.
It was while she was in Florida that Gjendem returned to a topic that had intrigued her for more than a decade. When Gjendem’s father died 14 years ago, her mother gave Gjendem several boxes of her father’s papers and mementos from his years of teaching at schools in Nebraska, Illinois, Kansas and, of course, Georgia.
Included was a booklet, its cover made of construction paper and its pages of lined paper filled with letters from her dad’s students at East Side School in Thomasville. “I thought it was cool,” Gjendem says. “It nagged at me. I wanted to figure out what these people were doing now.”
Once she moved to Florida, she was able to travel to Thomasville, where she did research at the library and historical society and met with a former principal, several former teachers and several students from the school at which Don Kruse taught.
While she hasn’t completed her research, Gjendem has already discovered that “things haven’t really changed much.” Thomasville integrated its schools in the early 1970s only because it was ordered to do so, she says. The move toward integration was successful for a time.
Last year, though, the local chapter of the NAACP filed suit against the city schools, charging that enrollment at two schools is, again, 100 percent black. “With that comes lack of funding, old textbooks — not a quality education,” Gjendem says, echoing some of the complaints that led to the original denunciation of the traditional “separate but equal” system in the South.
Though the situation in 1971 and ’72 may have been tense, Don Kruse enjoyed his years at Thomasville, Gjendem says. She has boxes of letters her father wrote his own mother during those years that indicate “he was very excited about the opportunity. I don’t think he quite understood it was a historical thing, but he loved Georgia. I know he liked the experience.”
The students, evidently, felt the same way about their teacher. The booklet that originally sparked Gjendem’s curiosity contains letters the students sent to Kruse when he left Georgia for Illinois. The letters from students, both black and white, say things like “You were a great teacher. We sure will miss you. Good luck in your new home.”
Those students are planning their 20-year high school reunion this summer, Gjendem says. It would be a great opportunity for her to interview more of them and get more material for her book. By that time, however, Gjendem and her husband will be living in Molde, Norway, where he has taken a job with New Media Science as a computer programmer.
She doesn’t have a job for herself lined up yet, Gjendem says, but she hopes to do freelance writing until a more permanent position comes along. And, as much as possible, she will continue to work on the book about her father’s years in Georgia.
To help her get in touch with people from East Side School, Gjendem has devoted a page on her Web site to the project. She describes the research she has already done and asks that people with information about that time and place get in touch with her via e-mail at rtgjendem@c2i.net. She even includes a list of the students’ names. The Gjendems are creating a new Web site once they get settled in Norway. It will be online soon at http://home.c2i.net/rtgjendem.
In the meantime, Gjendem reminds herself that what she learned as a student in the news-editorial department will also help her with the book: Get the facts right and the story straight.
“Maybe that’s why I haven’t done any writing yet. I’m still grasping for whatever the truth is,” she says. “Everybody’s truth is different, but I want to get the story straight.”