Today's Featured Biography

 
Linda Scarlett Jenks

I will be back with more information.

Right, I said I would be back - ages ago. But now I am...

In the first 15 years of my life, I traveled thousands of miles - to Canada, Australia, Canada again, then to Germany,where I lived for almost 8 years.
The influence of Germany led to my eventual career teaching German and French.
I found it difficult to settle in at age 15 to a life in the US, staying with my aunt and uncle in Wayne. For so many years, I thought of myself as a person with no nationality. During the years when I lived in Canada and Australia, I verbalized to others that I was an American, without having any idea what that meant. Doing this became much more difficult when I was living in Germany.

During my first year in Germany I attended a British Army school. While I wasn't British, I had lived in Australia for almost 2 years and had no trouble fitting in to the school.
However, the next transition I made to a German school for girls following the British school, brought with it a budding identity crisis. At home I spoke English and led an American life. At school I spoke very limited German and was identified as an interesting stranger. But I had to try to learn and act like my classmates, who were very helpful.

Three years in this school brought the beginnings of a new identity - that of a German teenager. Just as I had become comfortable with the school and the school system and was competing on a even playing field with my German classmates, my father picked up on my sense of belonging in this environment and decided he had to interrupt the process. After all, he wanted to raise an American girl, not a German girl.

So, with very little warning, my parents decided to send me to the American Army school in Frankfurt, Germany, which entailed 10 hours of train ride each weekend. In this school, I was to reconnect with my American identity. But I was boarding with a very traditional German family. with whom I spoke only German. So outside of school hours, I was back to my German identity.

The common thread throughout all of my schooling was that I liked to learn and was a good student. Even when I had contracted Polio and was hospitalized soon after the beginning of my second residency in Canada, I remained a good student in the classroom that was set up in the children's ward, where I spent almost 9 months.

Regardless of the surroundings, I always enjoyed learning and was a successful student. Each school system I experienced added a new dimension to my learning. There were some obstacles, such as learning three different methods of doing long division or calculating household finances in several different currencies. I did have a lot of good, patient teachers.

When I arrived in Wayne in 1956, I brought with me all of the experiences described so far. I knew nothing of Wayne and very little about this country. I heard myself referred to as a foreign student. Yet, this was MY country, I had been told.

During the first year I spent at Radnor, I lived with my sunt and uncle, who were very kind to take me in. My parents returned to the States for my senior year, and decided to live in Wayne, so I could finish at Radnor. My parents did everything they could to be sure that I became a real American - to a mixed success.

I did have some good friends at Radnor, but my acclimation to "my" country was definitely not complete. I still lived with the sense of being split into an American Linda and a German Linda. Somehow I felt that there was a place in the sky between New York and Frankfurt where my blood began to flow either in a German direction or into an American one, depending on the flight destination.

Thus, it was no surprise when my college major became German, once my father told me he would not pay for my education, if I majored in math, since that was no field for a woman. Once I had to discontinue the direction math would have taken me, I was somewhat at a loss and fell into a foreign language major by default. This major did not make my father happy either, but I guess it was better than math.

My dad envisioned me as some kind of a super secretary - even though he was sending me to one of the country's premier colleges. It was my good fortune that Madison had a well-established and well-respected German department. The French department, too, was replete with professors who had taught and published in France as well as in Madison. So, my German major/ French minor were established through a process of default. But it turned out to be serendipitous.

I was able to spend a year in Germany on a DAAD fellowship as a grad student and to keep my German Linda intact. And as a grad student, I became a Teaching Assistant, with a supervising teacher who was outstanding and provided me with an excellent introduction to the skills needed to teach a foreign language.

My first "real" teaching job, for which I was paid the massive sum of $4800 per year, was in Mukwonago, Wisconsin. I lived in an old farm house with my toddler son. My husband stayed behind in Madison for a while, where he worked on the Campus Police Force. His "plan" was to go back to school to prepare for some kind of work that he could do closer to where I was working. He did come to live in the old farmhouse for a while but commuted back to Madison and then to classes in Whitewater, Wisconson, for a while - I think.

What his actual plan was, was apparently less noble than he had expressed. He ended up being arrested driving a car that wasn't his, with a woman passenger whom I did not know - and that was the beginning of the end of our marriage. I did hear some strange, but probably true, stories about some of his activities after I had left Madison - in the apartment we had shared.

So, not only was I not quite sure about my national identity, I definitely did not know the father of my son.

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