Retired Princeton Township Clerk finds a new vocation at Johnson Park Elementary School
By: Marjorie Censer
Natalie Cruickshank didn’t want to be a teacher when her father suggested it after she graduated from high school. She couldn’t bear the thought of grading papers every night.
Yet, now in retirement, she reads to 136 children weekly at Johnson Park School and misses school during the summer.
For Ms. Cruickshank better known as Miss Natalie to her students, their teachers and the staff at the Princeton Public Library reading to children is the best job she’s ever had.
She throws herself into it working with librarians to choose books that match the subjects the children are studying and maintaining a collection of 54 stuffed animals, all of whom take turns accompanying her to the school.
On Thursday, at a second-grade class, Ms. Cruickshank read three books with a connection to France. But before she got to the books, she pulled out four stuffed animals to cheers from the students.
Yvette, a mouse bedecked with a red bow, was born in the Louvre, Ms. Cruickshank told the children. And the children yelled "Phokey’s back!" when Ms. Cruickshank pulled out a sea otter who hadn’t visited the students recently.
After reading three stories to the class, she polled the children for their favorite story. That’s one way, Ms. Cruickshank says, that she gets a handle on the best stories. Now entering her sixth year of volunteering at Johnson Park, she says she’s gotten good at judging what the children will like.
The Princeton Public Library has responded to her experience and has recently started publishing, in print and online, "Miss Natalie Reads" brochures, fliers that recommend a list of books in 10 different subject areas, including ocean life, transportation and machinery and women’s biographies.
Ms. Cruickshank grew up reading.
The daughter of a Harvard College professor, she originally wanted to be an actress. Her father offered her four years of college if she’d become a teacher or a nurse and two years if she’d learn a trade. Because she didn’t want to grade papers and was squeamish about blood, Ms. Cruickshank opted to attend Boston University for two years, where she learned typing.
While in Boston, she met her husband, Philip, who attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They were married, and she spent 12 years raising her children in Princeton. Her husband worked as a chemist at the FMC Corp.
After her youngest child began middle school, Ms. Cruickshank went back to work, first as a secretary at Princeton University, later as Princeton Township clerk in the early 1980s, and in her last job before retirement as a secretary at Merrill Lynch. In 1981, the same year her youngest child graduated from college, she finished her own college degree after six years of night classes at Rider University.
When she retired in 1995, she knew she no longer wanted to do secretarial work. She began volunteering with Springboard an after-school tutoring program at the library but left that in 2000. At a Princeton University basketball game, she met a third-grade teacher at Johnson Park who has since retired. That teacher told Ms. Cruickshank that her least favorite part of teaching was reading to the students.
Ms. Cruickshank was more than happy to take over the task, and she began reading to the children in that class in 2000. By the end of the year, she was reading to classes from kindergarten to third grade.
Each week, she goes to the library to find books appropriate for the children’s levels, matched to the subjects they are studying and are interesting to them. Before reading the books to the children, she practices them at home. Her 54 animals reside on the shelves that line her daughter’s room, and she totes them in a rolling cart to school on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
The children, she says, have responded to her reading. She’s received two marriage proposals since she began six years ago, and numerous thank-you letters. Her stuffed animals have become a part of the children’s lives.
When she received a free stuffed rabbit from CVS, she dubbed that rabbit Jacqueline Rabbit and married her to Peter Rabbit. Mr. Henry Blue, an oversized stuffed rabbit, presided over the ceremony which all the children begged to have held in school. Now, she says, they are asking when Octavia and Oglethorpe two stuffed octopi whose tentacles were entangled during a recent visit will get engaged, and they want the ceremony and the reception to be held in school.
However, she says, the favorite of all is Patrick O’Malley the largest stuffed animal. Ms. Cruickshank says she doesn’t just bring stuffed animals sometimes she bakes cookies and other times she shows relevant photos. For Halloween, she dresses as a witch, complete with hat and cape. When the children see her at the library or the supermarket, they run to hug her. She even has a private parking space at the school it’s labeled Reserved for Miss Natalie.
Ms. Cruickshank says she’s changed her mind about her father’s recommendation that she be a teacher.
"I think now I would’ve loved being a teacher," she said. "It’s a little late now for me to change careers."
But she says she’ll keep reading at Johnson Park as long as they’ll have her.
During the summers, "I miss school terribly," she said. "I’ve gotten to the point I just want to live here."