School Days: A Day in the Life of an Ohio Teenager in the 1930s

However it is also clear that Dorothy and her teammates did not play on an even playing field with the boys. Not only did girls have fewer choices when it came to teams to join, but the girls were also underfunded and underestimated.  Members of the boys’ basketball team were photographed wearing kneepads, while the girls, likely expected to play less aggressively, were not given this part of the uniform. Finally, as Dorothy reported in the yearbook, all senior basketball players were meant to be awarded golden basketballs, but the school appeared to have run out before each girl received one.After high school, Dorothy went on to Mt. Carmel School of Nursing. With her training established, Beavers joined the army in 1943 and worked as a Second Lieutenant at a veterans’ hospital in Indiana. Here she met her future husband, a surgeon named David Pecora, to whom she was reintroduced on the way to Ireland in 1944. The two were married in less than a year, with specific permission from General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and a dress and veil mailed from Dorothy’s mother. The two were married in Southern England in July 1944, and then separated for over a year as the war continued. The couple, married 70 years at the time of David’s death in 2014, spent their first year of marriage with only the military mail service to unite them.

Clearly Dorothy’s adventures had only just begun when she received her diploma from Scioto Township High School in the spring of 1938. Dorothy’s life is filled with many interesting stories, but with her high school papers we can see the lives of many Ohio teenagers emerge. Turning the pages of her scrapbook, you might glimpse what it meant to be young in the 1930s.