When Lemuel and Mary Grisham brought their children from Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, in 1905, to live in Santa Maria, their youngest child Eliza May Grisham was about 11 years old.
May attended the local schools and graduated as salutatorian from Santa Maria Union High School. Although she intended to become a doctor, and went to the University of California at Berkeley to prepare for this career, it wasn’t long before her love of children and teaching surfaced and she changed her major to education. She never regretted her decision.
Upon completion of her education, she returned to Santa Maria and accepted her first teaching position with the Orcutt School District. A short time later she moved to Banning where she taught school for a few years before homesickness took hold and she returned to Santa Maria and once again taught school in the Orcutt school district, where she remained until she retired in 1962.
With both Santa Maria and Orcutt being very small communities at the time, houses were scarce. Lemuel Grisham, being a contractor, built a seven-bedroom house at 327 West Boone Street to accommodate his family of three daughters, May Luisa (Barr), Lovie (Reiner), and Eliza May, plus a son, Allen.
May dearly loved her students, and dedicated her life to the children that she had the privilege of teaching.
“There never was a child who could not learn.”
She tutored her students both after school and at home on weekends and holidays, never accepting a fee for her services.
Still, though, Miss Grisham took no nonsense from anyone. In those days, kids were still subjected to corporal punishment, and May’s yardstick was always within reach. Furthermore, she never hesitated to use it.
One day, while she was whacking away on the rump of one misbehaving boy, she was on her third whack when the yardstick broke. This caused the class (and the misbehaving boy) to break out in laughter.
Miss Grisham, in seeing the humor in the incident, broke out in laughter, too. “A rare sight.”
Marilyn Cronk's father, who had been in Miss Grisham’s class in 1923, often told the story about someone putting a garter snake in Miss Grisham’s desk drawer while the class was on recess. When the class returned and Miss Grisham opened the drawer and saw the snake, instead of showing fear, she simply picked up the snake and dropped it out the window.
But it didn’t end there.
Having some sense as to who the culprit might have been, she walked directly to the boy and administered appropriate punishment. Marilyn didn’t say whether or not she used her old stand-by (the yardstick).
Marilyn also told me of a personal encounter that she'd had with Miss Grisham in 1944. She was late coming in from recess when Miss Grisham, who taught the 4th grade, “took me in hand and made me sit under her desk for about 15 minutes before allowing me to return to my class, with a note of explanation for my 3rd grade teacher.”
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May Grisham was an attractive woman with blue grey eyes and light brown hair, which she wore braided and twined around her head for many years until it became fashionable to “bob” it. She was a youthful and trim woman, standing about 5 feet 2 inches tall.
Music was a must for her and she studied with the local piano teacher, Mary Leslie Marshall, for many years. Her classroom had one of the few pianos available in the school district.
May was multi-talented and her handmade puppets were unique. On her small stage she produced puppet shows both for entertainment as well as learning techniques. In addition to her sketching and painting, her chalk drawings were most outstanding.
May loved teaching California history, and was said to be an authority on missions. Her classroom always had a true-to-scale scene of the California missions done in adobe, stone and straw, complete with Native Americans, padres, and animals pulling carretas and covered wagons dotting the landscape.
The woman didn’t take much time for herself as her children, and their needs took precedence. She did, however, have many hobbies, one of which was arranging the constantly blooming flowers that she grew in her garden. Her white and pink camellias were pictures of perfection. In addition to her taking care of her flower garden, she wrote poetry.
Although May never married, she was said to have once been engaged to a local man who died suddenly. The cause of his death was thought to have been a ruptured appendix.
May’s classroom was always a hub of activity. Some of her former students included people who went on to later fame, such as Judge Morris Stephan and Joe Nightengale.
While she was a dedicated teacher, she wasn’t much of a cook. Yet, when holidays such as Halloween came around, she would laboriously bake cupcakes, decorate them, and invite her students to drop by her home for treats. She decorated her dining room table in traditional décor, and had a punch bowl full of apple juice and a tray of her cupcakes for all who rang her door bell. Then she’d go through the annual ritual of trying to guess who was hiding behind his or her mask.
During her countless years as an educator she constantly strived to improve and upgrade her learning techniques by going to summer school.
Although May had retired in 1962, she continued tutoring at her home.
On March 29, 1964, while driving one of her students and his mother home after a tutoring session in her 1927 Hupmobile, a young boy of 16 failed to stop at a stop sign and ran into her car, hitting it so hard that it turned over.
Although her passengers were not injured, May’s injuries proved to be fatal and she died four hours later.
Eliza May Grisham is buried in the family plot in the Santa Maria Cemetery.