At 100, a former Masonic Home Mighty Mites teacher is long retired but still teaching

Once again, Marie Glick’s former Masonic Home students will help celebrate her birthday.

Marie Glick’s boys and girls are back to help her turn 100.

Of course, her former students at the Masonic Home and School of Texas aren’t exactly kids anymore.

They’re in their 80s.

“All the boys took Mrs. Glick’s typing class for one reason,” said Doug Lord, 80, a retired Dallas boxing trainer.

He winked.

“She was the prettiest girl at the school.”

Marie Glick’s former students have been gathering a lot lately, and not only because their favorite typing teacher and principal will turn 100 on Dec. 5.

Former Masonic Home teacher Marie Glick turned 100 on Dec. 5, 2007.
Former Masonic Home teacher Marie Glick turned 100 on Dec. 5, 2007.

The Masonic Home and School has been in the news — maybe more than when the east Fort Worth children’s home was actually open.

Alumni are rallying to preserve memories as a shopping village goes up on the land.

A new book, “Twelve Mighty Orphans,” has turned the Depression-era Mighty Mites’ football championship seasons into a sports bestseller.

And one of the greatest of those football heroes, former New York Giants lineman and Dallas newspaper cartoonist DeWitt Coulter, died Oct. 2 at 83.

“It seems like we get together a lot more now,” said Bill Walraven, 82, a retired Corpus Christi Caller-Times newspaper columnist and a Masonic Home graduate.

Marie Glick holds a photo of herself teaching at Masonic Home in 1953. Glick turned 100 Dec. 5, 2007.
Marie Glick holds a photo of herself teaching at Masonic Home in 1953. Glick turned 100 Dec. 5, 2007.

“Since they closed down the Home, I think we miss it more.”

Lord and Walraven were two of about a dozen former students who attended as special guests Sunday when Texas Wesleyan University threw an early birthday party for Marie Glick.

Mrs. Glick’s husband, Walter, was a Wesleyan dean, vice president and history professor over a 35-year career. Their former home near the campus will be dedicated Friday as the Glick House Community Counseling Center.

But Marie Glick is also remembered for her work as a teacher and principal at Masonic Home, which served survivors and descendants of Texas Masons.

She arrived in 1933 at age 25 as a typing teacher from the University of Texas at Austin and retired in 1974 as principal.

“She was the most loving teacher you can imagine,” said Miller Moseley, 85, a former football star who went on to work on the World War II atomic bomb project.

“And she was demanding. You didn’t loaf.”

Marie Glick looked around the reception room at Polytechnic United Methodist Church, her Sunday home for nearly 70 years.

“Masonic Home was really a home for me, too,” she told the people at the party. “I just felt like these kids were my own family.”

Wesleyan has thrown birthday parties for her since she turned 70. Some of the students who were at that party now have gray hair.

She repeated her best advice: “Do something that you love to do,” she said. “Do it as long as you can. Because when you retire, you’ll say, ‘Gosh, I sure wish I could do that again.’ ”

Schoolteachers have been on my mind lately.

Dona Stovall, the stern Arlington Heights High School chemistry teacher who taught John Denver laboratory science and made Bill Paxton sit up straight, died Thursday at age 76.

Her funeral is today in Cleburne.

Ray Crosslin, the Stripling Middle School math teacher who taught us how to use a slide rule and nearly talked me into a math career, died Oct. 29. He was 84.

And I went by to talk with Betty Quimby in the Trinity Terrace retirement center the other day. She was the Heights government teacher who taught us to both fear and laugh at Texas politics.

They’re till teaching us lessons.