The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1912-08-07
LIFE
 OF CRIPPLED GIRL
Sophie Wright Opened Her "Day School for Girls" i'm
 New Orleans at. Age of IA

Sophie Wright of New Orleans spent the first three years of her life as an ordinary baby. The next six years had made hopeless cripple of her. CrutcIles succeeded the chair. and s1se hobbled away to public school to be- gin her education.
 It was in the 1670s, and the educa- tion that the Southern pub1ic school had to offer in those days was fteele crippled, war-crippledr By the time I that Sohpie was fourteen, there was 1 nothing more for her to learn at 2 gschool. Besides, as she saw it, H was high time for her to assume her share of the falnily's support. There enough to live on, even with scrimp- ing. t~
 On the front of the little house where she lived she put up placard, crudely printed-they say she did ft . herself tEat within there was only fourteen years old: her hair hung down her back in a pIaft; her dresses left off just above her shoe tops; and she was crippled. But she was ready for business. And the bus mess came. Her tuition fee was fif- ty cents a month, and 1t was not long before she had twenty pupils and ain annual income of one hundred and twenty dollars. But this was too good to last, and after two years of 1t she plainly foresaw that she was doomed to lose her girls unless she further qualified herself to carry them for ward beyond her own initial achieve ment
 She was a good. natural mathenat- ician, and, because of if, was able fo effect an arrangement with a normal school whereby she gave some fnstruc- fion in mafhanoa ffcs in ewThau0e. for some instruction in languages. What she learned about languages at the normal school she brought back to her own school and handed on to her own pupils. The results were 80 satisfac-
 tory that her fame as teacher grew out of all bounds. and, after two more years, she decided to rent a house, at one hundred dollars month, for her school. It was a hazardous under taking. She had to borrow the lender charged her F per cent. a
 month.
 But when you are eighteen, even if your body has to get about on crutches, your spirit can soar, and Sophie Wright's led her forward. while heavy obligations she had assumed
 The enlarged school had become an accepted success, when one day cir
 GUS came to town. In it's. wake it left a young acrobat who had decid- I ed to shake off the sawdusf from his l feet and get ready to "be somebody. l At the time that he reached New Or | leans his ambition had centered on a civ.I-service position, and he wanted some instruction in geography and arithmetic, so that ne cOuld pass tne examination.
 r. Passing Miss wrights schoolhouse l one day. the sign Day School for
 Girls" caught his eye. At once his mind made a Sherlookian- deduction
 The person who taught a day school for girls might have some leisure for ] a night school for a young man who needed to know He put his case be- fore Miss Wright, and she agreed with him. Then and there began Sophie
 Wrights famous night schools fin New orleans. attended now by thousands of boys and men, and accounted one of the most important factors in the whole educational movement in New Orleans.
 As with the day school for girls, 60 with the night school for men and boys. It grew until it overflowed the building Anybody could join it. so
 long as he had to work in the day time and didn't have the money to pay his tuition anywhere else Miss Wright collected funds and borrowed funds and bought building TEen
 came 1897 and the yellow fever. Peo-
 pie scurried away from the city. and those that didn't scurry sickened and
 died by hundreds. Sophie Wright
 stayed by her schoolhouse and turned l it into a. storehouse of supplies, which
 she distributed In person. When the 1 fever had burned Itself out and the l city was rehabiIitated again, she re- sumed her day school and her night
 school and worked her way clear cT l smothering blanket of debt tEst .sS 1 communal disaster had entailed. Real 1 izing at last the pOtentiality Of her night schools, New Orleans took them
 over as part of it's educational sys- l tenn.
 Although she did other things for
 New orleans, like building a home for
 crippled children, it is the night schools that stand today as Sophie
 Wright's most lasting monument, and 1 it was chiefly because of the night I schools that, when she died this sum- ! mer. New orleans mourned for her as
 for 'the best-beloved woman in the city,
 Robert w. Herter, Lawrenceville.