Toni Morrison's Lorain

Description

Hermaine Speigle lived in Avon Lake as a young homemaker in the 1950s where she wrote poetry, later published posthumously by her family as Pop Concert: A Novelette in Verse, before she worked for the Lorain Journal. This article shows how Toni Morrison's high school teacher, Miss Edwards, helped her become an accomplished writer. This article was published on April 6, 1978, in the Lorain Journal.

Lorain’s Chloe Wofford--the famous novelist Toni Morrison is one and the same--has taken a circuitous route since her school days at Hawthorne Junior High and Lorain High Schools.

Professorships at Southern Texas and Howard Universities, a senior editorship with Random House Publishing Co., and a love affair with reading and writing have brought recognition and praise for her literary skill, money and fame--and honors from the Woman’s City Club of Cleveland. [but she could not come to receive the prize]

. . .

Her mother, Mrs. George Wofford, accepted the award for Toni, and several Lorain friends were in the audience, sharing the reflected glory.

. . .

Mrs. Wofford, who sometimes says “Chloe,: and at others says “Toni,” remembers that the child Chloe always enjoyed reading, treasured books lent to her by teachers at Hawthorne and Lorain High.

“Miss Edwards, a teacher at the high school, took a fancy to Chloe, lent her her own books, and told me it would be a shame if Chloe didn’t get to go to college,” Mrs. Wofford remembers. “In my day, I was ignored, isolated in the schools, but for Chloe, times were better. She was very friendly, inquisitive, and she mingled with everyone.”