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On May 8, 1942, at 8:00 p.m., the Senior Class of Iaeger High School took the stage to present the three-act farce comedy Aunt Minnie From Minnesota, directed by Mrs. Perce K. Martin.
The play was a comedy by Henry Rowland and appears to have been a fairly popular choice for school and community theater productions during this period. Contemporary descriptions portray Aunt Minnie as something of a cheerful “fixer-upper” who arrives in the small town of Brandon and becomes involved in the romantic and family complications around her. Other schools were staging the same play during the early 1940s, making Iaeger High School’s production part of a broader tradition of school theater in that era.
What makes this surviving program especially valuable is that it preserves the names of the Iaeger students who actually performed that evening:
Olen Collins — Aunt Minnie Miller
Martha D. Bland — Mrs. Emily Evans
Rubie Vance — Elvira Evans
Mary McKinny — Eva Evans
Hubert Rice — Emory Eaton
Ed. Groseclose — Guy Graham
George Bailey — Silas Spencer
Betty McArdle — Patience Perkins
Joe Beavers — Andy Andrews
Jean Carter — Cornelia Curtis
Margaret Ward — Nella Nelson
Jack Kirkpatrick — Worthington Winter
More than 84 years later, a simple folded theater program has become a small historical record—preserving not only a school event, but the names of a dozen young people who shared the stage at Iaeger High School during the spring of 1942.
The play was a comedy by Henry Rowland and appears to have been a fairly popular choice for school and community theater productions during this period. Contemporary descriptions portray Aunt Minnie as something of a cheerful “fixer-upper” who arrives in the small town of Brandon and becomes involved in the romantic and family complications around her. Other schools were staging the same play during the early 1940s, making Iaeger High School’s production part of a broader tradition of school theater in that era.
What makes this surviving program especially valuable is that it preserves the names of the Iaeger students who actually performed that evening:
Olen Collins — Aunt Minnie Miller
Martha D. Bland — Mrs. Emily Evans
Rubie Vance — Elvira Evans
Mary McKinny — Eva Evans
Hubert Rice — Emory Eaton
Ed. Groseclose — Guy Graham
George Bailey — Silas Spencer
Betty McArdle — Patience Perkins
Joe Beavers — Andy Andrews
Jean Carter — Cornelia Curtis
Margaret Ward — Nella Nelson
Jack Kirkpatrick — Worthington Winter
More than 84 years later, a simple folded theater program has become a small historical record—preserving not only a school event, but the names of a dozen young people who shared the stage at Iaeger High School during the spring of 1942.
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