There is a bit of a hiatus in my chronology of Miss Dee’s Career in the mid 1930’s. She taught at Texas Tech for four years after leaving Boston University. She was back in Oklahoma in 1939, but I am not certain what all she was doing there. She took a course, but I am not sure that she was teaching. Then in the early 1940’s—the war years—there is evidence that she was doing things at Emory University and Gammon Theologicl Seminary, but I have not completed my investigation of these clues. She returned to Shorter on her final mission in about 1945.
I have only three clues about what she may have been doing in the mid-thirties. One is that was in Shorter in 1935, and made a talk at the La Place Methodist Church when it celebrated its centennial in 1934. Then in 1936, she dedicated one of her books for Methodist Women to her cousin, Mamie Pinkston Lightfoot. She always stayed with that cousin and her husband, Dr. P. M. Lightfoot on her returns to Shorter. Standing alone, these two incidents would make no real suggestion; she may have just been visiting. But in 1936, she took a course from Alabama Polytechnic Institute—now Auburn University—that qualified her to teach in Alabama. Actually, the course was taught in Tuskegee, through Auburns extension service.
The new school building for the public school for whites in Shorter was built in 1938, at the location where the old school had been. My Dad would have been driving a school bus to the old school, and that is where he met my Mom. Oh, how I wish I had begun this project many years ago, so that the information about Miss Dee in the mid-thirties would have been readily available! I think maybe that at the heart of the depression she came back and taught at Shorter.
I have included this post, although incomplete, in order to describe the broad outline of the life of Mary Christine De Bardeleben. I plan to develop it further. I would welcome any information that anyone has dealing with this part of her life.
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