Remembering A Special Time

When Mrs. Hazel English Ferris, B.S.’32, was still Hazel English, she decided that with a last name like hers, it would be a good idea to become an English teacher.

“You get little wild ideas like that,” said Mrs. Ferris, who turned 94 last Nov. 13. “Well, I was a teacher, but I ended up teaching business. I taught shorthand and typing.”

Mrs. Ferris enrolled in the New York State College for Teachers in 1929 at the age of 24. She couldn’t afford to go to college right after high school, so she waited. Rather than stop her, the postponement strengthened her resolve.

“I think I had always wanted to be a teacher—I really had. I was working for the president of a box factory in Painted Post, N.Y., near Corning. He couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t stay for more money. I definitely wanted to go to college and nothing was going to change my mind about that. It wasn’t the money that was important to me, it was the education,” she said.

Mrs. Ferris recently gave the University a generous donation for two scholarships in memory of Professor George Morell York, who taught commerce from 1916 to 1947, and Professor Agnes Futterer of the Department of Theatre. “I’ve really been happy I could do it. They meant a lot to me in my life,” Mrs. Ferris said.

The influential Futterer, who graduated from the College in 1916 and began teaching at Albany in 1917, had a major impact on Hazel English and many other students.

“For 41 years she (Futterer) taught classes, directed performances, gave solo recitals, and traveled throughout New England for readings of 27 plays she had memorized,” wrote Kendall Birr in A Tradition of Excellence, the University’s official sesquicentennial history.

“She didn’t even know me from Eve,” Ferris said of Agnes Futterer. “She had a class of 100 of us. I learned about theatre and plays. I didn’t know much about plays, having come from Corning, which is a small place where they made glass. And she gave me an “A.” She liked what I wrote, I guess.” Futterer sparked Mrs. Ferris’s interest in the plays of Eugene O’Neill.

Mrs. Ferris also has fond memories of York. “Going on and getting a doctorate wasn’t as important to him as teaching people about business (commerce).”

She has a message for today’s students. “If you want to be a teacher, stick to it. In my mind it was worthwhile. It was something I loved doing.” Later Mrs. Ferris taught at the Rochester Business Institute for three years, resigning to have a family.

She still resides in the Rochester area. “I enjoyed all of my years at Albany and I loved all of the professors,” she concluded.