In the audience of over 300 gathered in the Hysham High School Auritorium was represented a cross section of people from all walks of life and from various parts of the country. Here in person, or in the cards and letters stacked on the stage, were lawyers, doctors, farmers, merchants, housewives and teachers. It was Monday, April 16, 1962, but this was not the small group usually seen at a Parent-Teachers' Association meeting. Helen Henrick's children had come home.
The local phase of the life that was to unfold from the stage on this warm April evening started without fanfare almost 50 years before. In the influx of settlers arriving in Hysham to take up the available homesteads, the Manning family of which Helen was a member came almost unnoticed. This condition was not to hold for very long.
The pressure of pioneer life: clearing the land; settling the towns and villages and establishing homes; had not obscured the need for adequate schools. Hysham High School had opened its doors somewhat informally a few years earlier but had not mustered a graduating class to that time. Helen, with four other girls, was a member of the Class of 1913, the first to be graduated.
The Sanders School in the Fall of 1913, and later the Sarpy School, proved to be the springboard from which this great career was launched. Helen's ability and influence was to spread across the entire community and into every home in what was later to become Treasure County.
Her professional career in the Hysham High School got under way when the Class of 1916 was graduated. From this point until her retirement from active teaching in 1946, the pattern was one of constant service to the community which she had adopted so many years before. But this vocation was not to conclude with the cessation of classroom duties. Mrs. Henricks soon took up the task of County Superintendent of Schools and, as such, her counsel and example continued to function throughout the Treasure County Schools.
Now, in April, 1962, seated on the stage of the Hysham High School Auditorium and facing this large group of students and well-wishers, Mrs. Henricks could contemplate her imminent and final retirement soon to come, with an awareness of duty fulfilled.
In her hands, a life membership in the National Parent-Teachers Association; beside her, hundreds of messages; in the audience before her, scores of her students . . . Yes, Helen Henrick's children had come home.
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