We have been carefully guarded by kind and zealous instructors from every averse wind of thought and every taint of evil to be met in a world of action just beyond us. Now our hands are unclasped; sorrowfully we separate to go our different ways, to live the lives to which we shall be called, no longer as a class, but as individuals. — Merry Mignon Thonton

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From my mother’s high-school valedictory speech given in Headrick, Oklahoma, in 1950, when she was sixteen years old