Life Spent Teaching

Emmalou McBroom Olson ’30 taught school for nearly 40 years, mostly sixth grade — a level she loved because of the rapport she had with students.

“The true value in teaching is how you change children’s lives. So many of them come to you discouraged. It happened over and over again — they’d come with a problem, and you could help them gain the self-confidence they could get no place else,” Olson says.

After graduating from CC, Olson earned a master’s degree from Colorado State Teachers College, now the University of Northern Colorado-Greeley. She taught in a two-room schoolhouse in Divide, then taught high school in Monument and elementary school in Colorado Springs, retiring in 1970.

Now 94 and retired for almost as long as she taught, Olson still misses teaching. “I loved teaching because I was doing something worthwhile, something lasting,” she says. She often took her classes to the Garden of the Gods park, just as her CC professors took classes off campus, sometimes meeting in their homes. One of Olson’s professors was Charles Mierow, who served as president of CC; another was his brother, Herbert Mierow.

In 1942, Olson and her husband, Mel, built a log cabin on their property in Palmer Lake, about 20 miles north of Colorado Springs, where they raised quarter horses and Arabian horses. Olson recalls that on especially snowy days, her husband would call the railroad engineer and ask him to stop the train to pick her up, so she wouldn’t have to drive to Colorado Springs. “That train would always stop,” she says.

Olson now lives in Jamestown, Calif., with her sister and their four pet llamas.