Florence Collins, Reid Hill’s favorite teacher
By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette, 05-13-2017
Florence Collins lived most of her life in the house where she grew up on Amsterdam’s Pulaski Street in the then predominately Polish enclave called Reid Hill.
Born in 1911, her parents were Anthony and Pelagia Lulkowska Dabrowski. They had come to America from Torun, Poland, birthplace of Copernicus. Her given first name was long and Polish and, according to her son’s eulogy, she decided to call herself “Florence” because of a neighbor woman who had that name.
A graduate of Amsterdam High, Florence earned her teaching certificate at Oneonta Normal School.
She served forty years as a fourth and fifth grade teacher in her Amsterdam neighborhood’s public school, Vrooman Avenue Elementary.
In 1935 the Recorder reported that Florence and her colleague Imogene Cook directed students in a play called “A Better Plan.” Instead of playing Halloween pranks on people, the characters in the play gave a sick child a “grand surprise on Halloween.”
Florence’s father died in 1937. In 1939 she married Henry Paierski of Schenectady, who changed his last name to Page. Henry took ill and died in 1943. He had been in the engineering department at the Alco locomotive plant in Schenectady.
Florence married her second husband, postal worker Andrew Collins, in 1951. Their son David became a pediatric anesthesiologist.
Florence Collins was an inspiring teacher according to students and fellow educators. Teaching reading was one of her specialties. Collins excelled at helping young students learn to read and also volunteered to help immigrants learn to speak and read English.
Sometimes when she walked home from school, she was accompanied by an honor guard of neighborhood students.
One high point in her career was in 1955 when she and her class of fifth graders produced two programs on the Eskimos of Alaska that aired live on WRGB television.
Sheldon Jackson, a native of Minaville south of Amsterdam, was a missionary who had a major impact on Alaska’s natives, so the television project had a local history aspect. As one of her students that year, I wore a parka and carried a small harpoon on television.
Legendary Amsterdam High basketball coach John A. Varsoke was principal at Vrooman Avenue in 1968 and spoke approvingly of Collins’s work.
“She never hesitates to cooperate and lend herself to difficult situations,” Varsoke wrote in a performance appraisal. “Her patience and concern for individual differences are a few of her attributes.
For her part she was proud that Tim Kolojay and Tom Urbelis, members of Varsoke’s Fabulous Five high school basketball team in the 1962-63 season, were her students.
Collins retired in 1976. Her mother died in 1984. Her husband died in 1999.
When Collins moved into the Sarah Jane Sanford Home on Guy Park Avenue in 2004, administrator Jeanne So remembered “an agile 92-year old” who was “twirling in the hallway outside her bedroom door, wearing a flowing floor-length skirt.”
“I have never forgotten the way you had of instilling into young minds that we were all special,” wrote her 1934 fourth grade student Stanley Goscinski (Gordon) in a letter to Collins in 2011.
“My goal was to teach with enthusiasm and compassion,” Collins replied. “After this letter I feel my goal was achieved. Stanley you have given me everlasting youth through these memories.”
Before her death Collins moved to a facility in Quincy, Pennsylvania near her son and daughter-in-law’s home. She died April 8 at age 105. After services in Amsterdam she was buried at St. Mary’s Cemetery in Fort Johnson. She is also survived by three grandchildren, two of them are medical doctors and the third is a teacher.
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