Sank, Nellie
(November 1, 1910 -- April 2, 2008)
School principalWhen Nellie A. Sank was a high school student in Hooversville, now a village of about 700 persons a short distance south of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where her father was one of the first Polish coaldiggers, teaching in the school was the last thing in her mind. Hooversville, first settled in 1794, emerged as a mining village in 1904 when a group of Philadelphia capitalists opened four drift mines in the surrounding mountains. In 1900, ten years before Nellie Sank was born, 851 of the 890 villagers were primarily German Protestants. By 1920 only 28 of 1,345 persons in Hooversville -- nine of them married women -- were from Poland. She was the first one in the Polish enclave to finish high school.
The mining settlement had then only two years of high school and Nellie Sank had to go to Stoystown, five miles away, with five others from Hooversville to finish high school. They walked to Stoystown the first year. In their senior year one of the students had an old coupe with a rumble seat and they rode to Stoystown in all kinds of conditions.
After that Nellie Sank earned a bachelor of science degree from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Her father, Frank, who worked with a pick and shovel in a coal vein less than four feet in thickness, and two brothers, Joseph and Walter, who followed in his footsteps, set aside as much of their pay in the mines as they could to send her to a teacher's college. "Those Sanks are crazy for sending that girl to school," people said. "She'll never get a job."
Altogether Frank Sank, who was born on Septemer 4, 1882, and his wife, Julia (Litwin), whom he married in 1907, the same year both came from partitioned Poland, raised five of nine children in Hooversville. They lost three boys and a girl at birth. The last two were Andrew and Louis. Whatever the origin of the family name, Poland did not have anyone named Sank in 1990.
In April 1933 the school board of Hooversville hired Nellie Sank to teach in the high school. She was attacked. Prior to her appointment Hooversville did not have a Catholic school teacher. The students in her classroom were just as backward as their parents. Because of her faith, the Protestants in Hooversville wanted the school board to discharge her. But Dr. Jerry James, a school director, stood by her side and encouraged her not to quit. She weathered the storm. When Hooversville High School was changed to a junior high in 1951, she became the principal at that school after she had earned a master's degree from the University of Pittsburgh.
Six years later, when an adjacent school district built a high school in Kantner, one of the school directors asked her to apply for the principal's job. She did not want to stand in the way of a friend who wanted the job and submitted no application. The school director, however, was persistent, He visited Nellie's home and would not leave until he had her application in his hand. It contained one sentence. The following morning she was notified that she was appointed principal of the new high school. Needless to say she took good care of Forbes High School, as it was known for awhile, for fifteen years.
For more than forty years, while educating 39 years of high school classes, she still found time to play the organ Saturday evening, Sunday mornings and other days at Holy Family Catholic Church in Hooversville, just across the street from the nest of the Sank family. The bachelor in the family, who renamed himself Waldo, lived with her until his death on February 10, 1995, and both devoted their time to better their own village. She received many awards from school administrators, the local VFW post, Lions Club, church, and other organizations for her work in Hooversville.
The Sanks was one of the families that started Holy Family Catholic Church at Hooversville in 1911, and Nellie Sank was the last one of her family to belong to it. After her death, she was buried in Holy Family Cemetery.
Author: Edward Pinkowski (October 23, 2009)