Remembering Sarah
Sarah Theresa Casey (later Van Sant) planned to become a kindergarten teacher before she decided to study nursing in Chicago. In the photograph below, she is standing outside the office of her stepfather, Henry C. Morrison, in Augusta, Georgia around 1915.
October 25, 2018
This photograph of my maternal grandmother, Sarah Theresa Casey Van Sant (1895-1992) was taken around 1915 in Augusta, Georgia. Sarah married US Army Lt. Clarence Rowley “Van” Van Sant (1891-1963) in 1919. They separated around 1932 and divorced in 1940. My mother, Mary, was the third of Sarah and Van’s four children. In 2018, I asked Mary to tell me about this picture. Since she didn’t like to be recorded or filmed, I typed out her memories as she spoke.
That’s my mother, Sarah. I’ve seen this picture many times before. I love the outfit she has on – the shoes, the hat, the collar and cuffs. She’s out in front of her stepfather Pa Morrison’s office in Augusta, Georgia. You can see the sign there.
Sarah was a rebel. Everybody in our family in Sarah’s generation and before went to Catholic schools. But the Sisters of Mercy girls’ high school in Augusta had lost its accreditation. Sarah’s older siblings, Frankie and Bubba, both finished eighth grade then went to some kind of training program. But neither of them ever had a high school diploma. Sarah refused to go to the nuns for high school. She wanted to go to teacher training school to become a kindergarten teacher. You couldn’t get into one of the teachers’ colleges without a diploma from an accredited high school. So Sarah went to Tubman, the public high school, and graduated from there.
After she graduated from eighth grade, Frankie went to the business school of Miss Maggie Funk. Frankie had always been close to the Caseys, her father Dick’s people. Some of her Casey aunts ended up moving to Chicago. Frankie went to Chicago because of her aunts being there, and she became a legal secretary.
Sarah visited Frankie in Chicago after she graduated from Tubman. Her original idea was to visit and go back to Georgia for teacher college. But while she was in Chicago, she saw an advertisement for a nursing school at the famous Mercy Hospital on the South Side of Chicago. She decided to find out more about it, and then she decided to enroll.
In 1915, she enrolled in nursing school at Mercy Hospital. She graduated in 1918 and went back to Augusta. During the big flu epidemic, she met many of the army officers at Camp Hancock, where there was an officer’s training school. That’s where she met my father, Van. Van was an army officer from California. They were married on June 9, 1919. Van was a widower and a protestant. In those days, when you married a non-Catholic, you didn’t get married in the church. They got married at her mother and stepfather’s house on Watkins Avenue.