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Passion, Purpose & Power

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    25. Alma Mckibbin

    Ellen White’s counsel on elementary education during the mid-1890s exerted an extremely positive influence on Adventist education. During the decade from 1895 to 1905, the number of Adventist elementary schools grew from 18 to 417. It was in the midst of this phenomenal explosion in the number of Adventist church schools that pioneer California educator Alma McKibbin authored our first elementary Bible textbooks.PPP 139.1

    Answering a needPPP 139.2

    Teachers were begging for Bible lessons. At summer schools some would sit for hours and copy lessons from my notebooks. At last Professor [M. E.] Cady91Marion E. Cady (1866-1948); president of Healdsburg College, Healdsburg, California (1899-1903). insisted that I have my lessons printed. Some teachers made no attempt to teach the Bible, because they had no prepared lessons. If the Bible was not taught, then all our effort to establish church schools was in vain.PPP 139.3

    And so once more I must do what I did not know how to do—write books and publish them. The Healdsburg College92Healdsburg College, the forerunner of Pacific Union College, operated from 1882 to 1908. Starting as an academy, it was elevated to a college. The school was located in Healdsburg, California. Press printed my first books at my expense. The work went slowly. The college press was a very simple print shop, not too well equipped with anything, but the printer, Arthur Haines, did wonderfully well with his meager resources. I was not only author but proofreader and business manager as well.PPP 139.4

    The teachers sent in orders and were so urgent that I could not wait for the entire book to be printed, but sent each signature as it came off the press. There were 12 signatures in the first book. Twelve times I trudged more than a mile931.6 km. to the post office to mail them, doing this after my teaching day was done and home duties were yet to be done. Pioneer work is not easy.—Alma E. McKibbin, Step by Step, 1964, p. 80.PPP 140.1

    Shoestring textbooksPPP 140.2

    I’d begun in my first school to make outlines for these lessons, and right then, I had to make lessons for grades I was teaching. And these teachers wanted to know what I had taught in the family school and in this church school. All I had was my old battered notebooks in which Id put the lessons, and written them on the board. They were just outlines, and somebody had said not to give lessons on Daniel, but to take the stories of the Old Testament. Well, I believe in chronology; I don’t believe in teaching about Abraham before you teach about Adam. So I began with Adam. I made out my own lessons, and Id advised these teachers to do that. But they came back to the next summer school. They’d gotten along very well with everything except Bible. They couldn’t make lessons. They just couldn’t do it! Well, Professor [M. E.] Cady says, “You’ll have to publish yours.” There was a press at the College, and they were printing whatever they needed in the College. He said they’ll print your lessons for you. So I began the wearisome work. And in the first you know theyd print them by signatures. Well, they were in such haste for them that I punched holes in the signatures, and the only thing I had available was shoestring. I mailed a shoestring with the first one, put it through these holes, and told them other signatures would follow which they could add to it. And those were the first books. They called them “the shoestring books.”PPP 140.3

    The next year the printer made backs for them. Then I gave them backs to put on, but before that they had nothing but a shoestring to hold these different signatures together. And then when they made the books, they made the holes to correspond, and that’s the way they used the shoestrings. That’s the way they were bound.—McKibbin, oral history interview conducted by James Nix, September 30, 1967.PPP 141.1

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