Teacher began in one-room schoolhouse

11/14/2006

BOWLING GREEN - Pauline M. Henschen, 94, a longtime elementary schoolteacher in the Eastwood Local district, died of kidney failure Saturday in the Lutheran Village at Wolf Creek, Springfield Township, Lucas County.

Mrs. Henschen was born in Toledo and attended Bowling Green Normal College, from which she graduated in 1932 with a teaching certificate, her nephew, Glenn Abke, said.

She worked in the infants' department of the downtown Toledo Sears store for a few years before finding her first teaching job in a one-room schoolhouse in West Hope, Ohio. She married her husband, Delbert Henschen, in 1940, and the couple settled on his family's farm near Bowling Green.

Mrs. Henschen started teaching second and third grades at Webster Elementary School in Scotch Ridge, Ohio, in about the mid-1940s, and went on to teach several generations of students there until her retirement about 1980, her niece, Joanne Dellinger, said. Midway through her career, she went back to school and, in 1960, received a bachelor's degree in elementary education from Bowling Green State University.

Her husband died in 1996. Surviving is her sister, Margaret Harrer.

Visitation will be after 2 p.m. tomorrow in the Marsh Funeral Home, Luckey, Ohio. Services will be at 11 a.m. Thursday in Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church, Dowling, Ohio, with visitation an hour before the service. The family suggests tributes to the Eastwood Educational Foundation for the Pauline and Delbert Henschen Scholarship, the Pauline and Delbert Henschen Outstanding Educator Scholarship at Bowling Green State University, or Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church.