ABSTRACT
In the spring of 1916 during a driving snow storm, Assistant Superintendent Annie Klingensmith discovered Katie Poppaditch, "a lame child, without coat, mittens or head covering, falling repeatenly [sic] on snow covered ice, crying and rubbing her face with freezing wet hands what time she was not on hands and feet trying to get up with bare hands in snow above the elbow." She took the child home, which was located up a narrow passage between a saloon and barber shop on Washington Street between Thirteenth and Fourteenth Avenues. Frightened because of the rough neighborhood, Klingensmith was surprised to find in the "shacks and fiats a great collection of Froebel School children." She also discovered that many of the children in the predominantly male neighborhood—composed of pool rooms, barber shops, boarding houses, and saloons—were unregistered because the teachers were afraid to go there. "The larger girls in Froebel beg the women not to go into certain districts, out of which they have been warned by their parents." The children living in the heavily immigrant, overcrowded south side had wretched home conditions. But, Klingensmith and many others considered those children lucky to have the opportunity of attending the Froebel school, the linchpin of the increasingly famous Gary school system. 1
