Rose Higdon Biography (Long Version)

When Rose Musacchio Higdon was growing up on the South Side of Chicago, she was painfully aware of how different she and her parents (who ran a dry cleaning and shoe repair store) were from their neighbors. She lived in three cultures, as she later wrote in an autobiographical book co-authored with her husband, Hal Higdon. The book, Falconara: A Family Odyssey, told the history of the Italo-Albanian village by that name where her parents were born.

"We were not only different from our Irish and Polish neighbors," she wrote, "we also were different from the other Italian immigrants in nearby Grand Crossing. While they spoke Italian at home, we spoke an unusual Albanian-Italian dialect called 'Arberesh.' It was a dialect that few outside our family understood."

Rose Musacchio attended Fenger High School and then Chicago Teachers College (now Chicago State University). After graduation in 1956, she applied for a job teaching in the Chicago school system. Her first teaching job was third grade at Howland School in a tough West Side ghetto area, where you grow up fast or don't survive.

"In retrospect, teaching at Howland expanded my education," Musacchio would later recall. "It taught me how to relate to people who after several hundred years in America had even less than we had." She told her students the story (learned from her mother) of her older brother Tony going to school and being made fun of because of his secondhand clothes. Tony's teacher had scolded the children, saying his clothes were clean and well-mended. When she used this story in her classes at Howland, mothers who had little other than love to offer their children would come to school to thank her.

In the winter of 1957, she met Hal Higdon in a recreational bowling league. He had just been discharged from the U.S. Army. "I was immediately attracted to her," Higdon recalls, "but it took me two months to work up the courage to ask her out." They were married a year later and had three children, named Kevin, David and Laura. Rose soon quit her job as teacher to concentrate on raising their family; Hal also quit his job as editor to become a freelance magazine writer. They moved to a home in Long Beach, a suburb of Michigan City, Indiana on the shores of Lake Michigan. She volunteered for various organizations and served as president of the Dunes Arts Foundation, a sponsor of summer theater. In 1974, Musacchio Higdon returned to teaching with the Michigan City Area School system at Mullen School, then Long Beach School.

Musacchio Higdon obtained her master's degree in education from Purdue University in 1980 and organized many innovative programs while teaching everything from third to sixth grade. She created a nature trail behind Mullen School and served as a Science Fair presenter at Mullen and Long Beach Schools. During this time, she moderated a program titled "Parenting Pathways: You're Not Alone" on the local public access channel.

Each spring, she brought her students to the Art Institute of Chicago to climax a year-long study of art. "A lot of people think you can't teach Art Appreciation to twelve-year-olds," explained Musacchio Higdon, "but that's not true." They would take the South Shore Line train from Michigan City to Chicago and first tour the Loop observing outdoor art, including the Picasso Statue, before entering the museum. Each student would go to a painting chosen in advance and create a poem while seated in front of it. In 1991, she was one of the finalists for Indiana Teacher of the Year.

Her fitness activities are more varied than that of her running husband, but she did complete one marathon: Honolulu in 1983. In another fete of endurance, she bicycled across Iowa in RAGBRAI (The Register's Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa): 450 miles in seven days. She cross-country skis in winters and walks and bikes in summers. "One of my most enjoyable summer activities," says Musacchio Higdon is biking with my longtime friend Valerie Brady to a local deli, where we sit and talk. We enjoy the talk as much as the exercise."

In 1991, Musacchio Higdon received a Lilly Endowmen Teacher Creativity Fellowship Grant, which allowed her and her husband to travel to Albania to complete work on Falconara: A Family Odyssey. That Iron Curtain country had been closed to citizens of the United States for four decades; the Higdons were among the first individual Americans allowed to visit. The autobiographical book told the story of seven families who fled Albania in the 15th century, founding a village in Italy where people have retained their Albanian language and customs for 500 years! In 1994, she retired from teaching to assist husband Hal market his books at Expos and on the Internet. She also has served as an officer in Delta Kappa Gamma and the American Association of University Women and participated on the planning committee for Sinai Forum, which brings well-known lecturers to Michigan City. In addition to three children, Rose Musacchio Higdon has nine grandchildren.