When students at St. Louis U. High think of their teachers’ upbringings, they may tend to imagine reading, studying, and working, not milking cows, chopping wood, and canning vegetables. Two faculty members at SLUH today were not always connoisseurs of the academic subjects; instead, they grew up on rural family farms.

English teacher Jennifer Carroll and Math teacher Walker Yane each grew up on modest rural estates secluded from the hustle and bustle of city life, a lifestyle most SLUH students can relate to. While they share these similar backgrounds, Carroll and Yane also have a lot of differences when it comes to how they grew up.

Carroll grew up near Krakow, Missouri, a town so small that it’s not on the map. Her family farm was very conventional and focused mostly on livestock.

“They would have anywhere between 20 to 50 head of cattle, these are all beef cattle, they're not dairy cattle, so they ship them and other people to raise them to when they're ready to be slaughtered for beef,” said Carroll, “When I was in grade school, my dad sold all the hogs, in the ’80s pork prices were very low, so my dad was not making a lot of money and so he sold all the hogs and he has just maintained his herd of cattle ever since then.”

For such a grand agricultural operation, it took the whole Carroll family to keep things moving. The farm was a family tradition, and Carroll’s parents, aunts and uncles, and grandparents lived there together.

“The farm has been in my family for awhile, we are probably approaching the 100-year point,” said Carroll. “I think my grandfather was born in 1918, and I think the story is that his family moved to that farm when he was three years old, which would have been right at 100 years now. He spent his entire life there. My father still lives there and he grew up there. So my grandparents’ house is on the property kind of right next to where my parents now live.”

Carroll’s house on the farm was built in the 1980s, but still did not have heat. Part of living on the farm involved keeping the house warm and preserving food for the winter.

“We would spend Thanksgiving break pulling down whatever trees we had identified during the summer as dead and cut those down,” said Carroll. “We did have a lot of gardens growing up; at the highest point we had three gardens. My mom, my aunt, and I grew up canning a ton of stuff. We would can green beans, tomatoes, and all kinds of stuff in the garden.”

Yane’s story has many parallels to Carroll’s. He grew up in the town of Oldenburg, Indiana, population 674. But his home was less of a farmstead and more of a log cabin in the woods.

“My parents own 87 acres in a really hilly, rocky wooded area, so it’s not very good for farming in general,” said Yane. “The point wasn't to really farm; my parents were back-to-the-land types. Growing up, we always had 50 chickens, six cows, 10 pigs and a big garden. That was pretty much the general vibe of the place.”

Yane’s parents built a log cabin for his family on the land. The cabin provided the very basic necessities for life, excluding heat and air conditioning. Growing up, Yane took on many responsibilities to keep the farm running smoothly.

“My summer job was to split eight cords of wood for the winter and we also did a ton of canning,” said Yane. “We pick two days at the end of the summer and into the fall and we just do beans one day, and another day we do tomatoes and can a bunch of tomatoes, that sort of thing. So we had canned food throughout the winter.”

Much like Carroll, Yane’s parents were both teachers at a local school. Over the long summer break, they could devote most of their energy toward upkeep of the property. Although Yane had a unique home life, his education was more ordinary. He went to a local grade school near his house, and then for high school he ventured into Cincinnati to attend St. Xavier High School, which was over an hour away from his small town.

“That was a lot, but there was a group of us from the town kind of near me, maybe four or five of us went in, so we had a big carpool,” said Yane. “So it'd be a drive into town, get picked up, fall asleep in the carpool van.”

Both Carroll and Yane became aware of their unique living situations at a young age. They knew their peers had different experiences from them and were more exposed to the outside world.

“I don't know that any of my friends even grew up on a farm,” said Carroll. “So even as a kid growing up, I was aware that this is kind of different. Certainly, you know, a lot of people might have owned more property, it was a little bit more rural, but I don't know that many of them grew up on a farm.”

“Basically it would be like, I would go over to my friend’s house and we would watch TV,” said Yane. “That was cool, but I mean, I was out in the middle of nowhere, a lot of my friends were at least removed from a town. None of my friends lived in a city until I went to high school; once I went to high school I was  acutely aware that my upbringing was significantly different.”

Carroll and Yane are examples that SLUH teachers come from all walks of life. They grew up chopping wood and tending to cattle; now they teach Shakespeare and geometric proofs. Both of them still have family living on their childhood farms and visit their childhood homes frequently.

“I still spend at least a month there every summer,” said Yane. “I spend a couple of weeks in the winter, you know, that sort of thing. I still spend a significant amount of time there. And, in fact, the move to St. Louis, part of the reason was to be able to take a good weekend, if maybe we have Monday or Friday off, and it's only five hours away, so I can drive there now.”

“The thing that I became very aware of growing up was the trade offs and the choices,” said Carroll. “My dad still gets up at 4:30 in the morning to take care of cows and it is so much work. Some of the opportunities and the experiences I have I would not be able to have if I didn’t live out there.”