It was reunion time at the White House recently. Hillary Clinton met with her former 2nd-grade teacher, Caroline Cappucio O’Laughlin, who taught the first-lady-to-be at the Field School in Park Ridge in 1955. O’Laughlin, now retired after 40 years of teaching, was unaware of her connection to Clinton until she dreamed of the name “Hillary” one night and checked the Park Ridge records. Sure enough, a Hillary Rodham was enrolled in her class that year, and a class photo shows a pre-Whitewater, pre-Willie, pre-Stridex Hillary sitting primly in the front row.
An exchange of letters brought an invitation to visit D.C., where O’Laughlin was greeted warmly by Hillary and given a personal tour of the White House. The former teacher, who now lives in Schaumburg, hoped to meet Mr. Hillary, but the Oval Office door was closed. “He had the Russian ambassador in there,” she reports. Hillary recalled two things in particular about 2nd grade: O’Laughlin’s 1955 wedding, which most of the class attended, and a race O’Laughlin held to see who could write all the numbers from 1 to 1,000 fastest. “As I recall, I came in second,” Hillary said, affected enough by the experience to remember it 39 years later.
“Conscientious, serious, an ideal student,” is the way O’Laughlin remembers Hillary. Also a bit intense. The day of the class photo, little Hillary’s Mary Jane shoe strap broke, O’Laughlin says, “and she was crestfallen about posing like that. That’s why she’s not smiling. She was a very sensitive girl.”
O’Laughlin, who takes reading very seriously, holds a patent on a teaching aid called the “Reading Guideline.” Hillary told O’Laughlin her reading methods “worked for me.” O’Laughlin also sells real estate. Wonder if some of that also rubbed off on Hillary.