Superior Queen, Wilma Bayes

I went to Superior Elementary School in East Cleveland, Ohio. Named ostensibly after Superior Road, the street where it was located at the foot of Superior Hill, Superior School was, indeed, a superior school.

This was due entirely to the singular visionary efforts of the extraordinary principal, Wilma Bayes, my childhood hero.

She was the last of her breed of dedicated spinster schoolteachers. When she started her career in the early years of the 20th century, it was illegal for teachers to marry. So she chose to devote her life to educating and expanding the horizons of the students she loved. Wilma Bayes had been principal of Superior School for probably 40 years by the time I knew her. She was principal there when my mother was in the same elementary school in the late 1920s.

Miss Bayes was a spinster, all right. She spun devotion, passion and compassion; knowledge, understanding and practice; creative individuality and community spirit; art and science, and most seminal for me - ritual. (By the way, seminal does not refer to semen, but to Semele, an ancient Moon Goddess. But I digress.)

It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought - that is to be educated.

- Edith Hamilton, Anthropologist