Special Interest Group: Retired Home Economists

If you know how to prepare a healthy meal, sew a button on a shirt or balance your checkbook, chances are you learned those skills at a home economics class in school.

And if you think such classes are no longer important, the Spokane Area Retired Home Economists would like to correct that impression.

Group members meet a few times a year to reflect on their careers, catch up with each other and talk about the future of the profession they’re proud to be a part of. Last week, a few members gathered at Donna Graham’s Greenacres home.

“Our group has been in existence since 1929 in one form or another. We’ve changed names a few times over the course of 94 years,” Graham said.

In 1996, the profession rebranded as family and consumer sciences to reflect the broader spectrum of classes offered.

Graham said they also wanted to avoid the stigma that they only taught cooking and sewing.

“The Spokane group chose to return to the name ‘home economists’ because all of their degrees were earned under the original name, and they spent their careers as such,” she said.

“We’ll be home economists till we’re dead,” Cathy Lobe said.

She found her calling in seventh grade when she took a home ec class.

“I told my mom I want to do that when I grow up,” said Lobe, who taught at North Central High School. “I loved it the day I went to work, and I loved it the day I retired 27 years later.”

Lobe worked with Cleo Clizer, an educator and administrator at Spokane Schools. Clizer had planned to be a music major.

“My mother sewed everything I wore and cooked everything I ate, but she didn’t have time to teach me,” Clizer said.

She changed her major while attending the University of Montana and started teaching immediately after graduation.

Jayneta Butler attended Eastern Washington University but married before graduating. When she became a single mom, she returned to school when her four kids were in their teens.

She taught at NC and Lewis and Clark High School before launching a sewing business.

Sewing was a necessity when she was young.

“I grew up on a farm,” she said. “We didn’t have much money. We had to make our clothes.”

Like Butler, Graham didn’t attend college until later in life. She thought she’d like to be a home ec teacher.

“Midway through my student teaching, I realized I’m not meant for the classroom,” she said.

She earned her master’s in adult and continuing education and had a thriving sewing business for 20 years before retiring.

One member of the group isn’t retired.

Debbie Handy, a professor and interim chair of the Department of Human Development at Washington State University, said she decided to be a teacher in eighth grade.

“By 10th grade, I knew I wanted to be a home ec teacher.”

She said the need for the classes and for educators to teach them has increased.

“There’s a strong need for family and consumer science teachers in grades eight to 12,” Handy said, adding that her students at WSU usually have jobs before they graduate.

While some may believe these classes to be dated, Handy said they are more valid and vital than ever.

“People don’t understand the science behind family and consumer science,” she said. “This is a critical science. It’s a STEM field.”

Clizer agreed.

“To keep a family going, you have to have some of the skills we taught, like budgeting and nutrition,” she said.

People who aren’t raising families benefit from those skills, too.

Lobe recounted a recent shopping experience. She was chatting with the young man bagging her groceries and told him she was a retired home ec teacher.

“Home economics teaches you how to read labels and make good choices even if you don’t cook at home,” she said.

The grocery store employee felt his education was lacking.

“I would have loved to take a home ec class,” he said. “I would know how to take care of myself.”

For more information about Spokane Area Retired Home Economists email Donna Graham at donnacgraham@msn.com