We last left off with Mata when she was enrolled in primary school. Fast forward a few years, and she’s attending high school in Two Rivers. She would have started having to think about what she wanted to do in her future, not unlike the anxiety high school students feel now.
Mata’s parents had grown up on farms and had not had much of a formal education other than some years in tiny country schoolhouses. But they were able to scrimp and save enough money to offer their children better opportunities than they had had, and all of them would use that opportunity and all find their own paths in life. Mata, being the oldest, was the first. After finishing high school in Two Rivers, she went to Oshkosh Normal School (which later evolved into the current University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh). She attended it for two years, and received a teaching license in 1909.
J.A.H. Keith, the president of Oshkosh Normal School, wrote this about Mata as a later job recommendation: “Her scholarship was very good in normal school. She was always to be relied upon and she bears her responsibility well and cooperates well. Miss Hartung was full of promise on leaving here and made a great success of her work after leaving the normal school.”
We can get a rough idea of Mata’s personality around this time from a short note written to her by a D.R. Clow, dated November 14, 1907:
“You have a fine voice, but can learn to handle it better. You do not open your mouth enough to let the sound out freely. Go into the public speaking class, or take special pains with your decorations about handling your voice. You have the temperament too for doing good work as a reader. As you spoke I could not keep away the thought that at the next moment I should hear the playing of a piano.”
By her own later admission, Mata was incredibly shy at this time, mentioning one experience in a later autobiographical essay: “I was hampered by shyness. No wonder that at the high school prom I sat there watching the rest dance and again a repeat at the Normal. In fact one time the Chemistry teacher asked me to dance. And that was such a highlight that I did not care if I had had no other chance.”
This would start Mata on a journey that would take her as far away as 1,500 miles away from her hometown and into multiple isolated small towns over the course of more than a decade. But for her first teaching job, she would teach for a few years in a village in northern Wisconsin named Dunbar, about 130 miles from Two Rivers. Her time there will be covered in the next article.
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