Teacher Appreciation Week: Remembering Helen Engelbach

It’s Teacher Appreciation Week and we want to thank all the teachers who work so hard to educate our community’s children. They do a great job!! Thank you teachers!!!

Today, we also want to feature a former Warrenville teacher who taught in Warrenville for 16 years, Helen Bell Engelbach. Helen gave an interview to the Warrenville Press which provided us so much insight into her time here in town. We hope you enjoy reading all about it. Do any of you remember her? Please leave some of your memories here or share any fond memories you have of your Warrenville teachers with us! And be sure to thank your teachers this week!

Much of Helen Engelbach’s life was shaped by the Great Depression and gender discrimination, but despite those challenges she had a successful career teaching students physics, trigonometry, English and art for over 30 years.

Helen was the only female graduate of the chemistry curriculum at Thiel College in Greenville, Pennsylvania, where she was raised. When she looked for employment, she was not even able to get an interview with a chemistry laboratory because she was a woman. She worked at a library through college and took a full-time job there when she got her degree, but when the Great Depression hit the library cut her position. She took a job teaching physics, English and trigonometry at a small school outside of Pittsburg but was laid off from there along with two other female teachers due to the deepening Depression.

During her next job teaching English in Sharpsville, Pennsylvania, she married her hometown boyfriend Robert Engelbach. The couple moved to Tennessee, Indianapolis and Ohio in search of stable work before they finally found good employment in Chicago. They loved the big city, but the Engelbach’s now had three children, so in 1945 they took the Aurora Elgin & Chicago interurban rail line out to Wheaton to look for a house for their family. Helen reflected on this journey to Wheaton in the following way, “we didn’t like it. [Robert] said, ‘Let’s go on to Warrenville.’” When they got off the train here in Warrenville, Ed Ruzicka welcomed them at his Drugstore and pointed them down the street to the home of someone the Engelbach’s were acquainted with and on their way down Warren Avenue, they saw a house for sale and immediate put down earnest money.

The Engelbach’s made Warrenville their home. The family grew to seven, with Helen, Robert and five children. The kids all went to Holmes School and Helen taught them all as they made their way through the school, kindergarten through eighth grade in those days. Helen joined the Holmes School teaching staff in 1952 when St. Irene had to send their 150 students to Holmes because they couldn’t secure nuns to teach at the Catholic School. Helen was hired by the superintendent to help out with the increase in students. She remembered an informal school where teachers made things work, sharing space and helping out where they could. During her 14 years at Holmes, she taught mostly language arts and art. After some time, she began teaching mathematics and language arts to the seventh and eighth grades.

When Bower School opened in 1966, Helen went to teacher there. She was at Bower for two years, and in 1968 she took a new job teaching in West Chicago where she taught another seven years.

After she retired from teaching, Helen joined the first Warrenville Library Board, helping to oversee the expansion and new library building opening. In 1999, Helen served as a Fourth of July parade marshall and the next week celebrated her 90th birthday with a surprise party with 100 friends. Helen loved how many people throughout town knew her. She remarked that when she visited Frank’s later that week, the woman checking her out said “Happy Birthday! I was in your sixth grade class!” Everywhere she went someone knew her by name. Helen lived the rest of her life here in Warrenville and passed away peacefully at her home in 2012 at the age of 102.