Profile[]
Name: June Crabtree
Nick Name: Miss Crabtree
Played By: June Marlowe
Born: 1904
Relatives: Jack (brother)
Clubs: None
First Short: Teacher's Pet
Last Short: Readin' And Writin'
Character[]
Bio: June Crabtree is a teacher at Adams Street Grammar School, replacing the former teacher, Miss MacGillicuddy, who was very loved and appreciated by the kids already there. It's revealed she's from Poughkeepsie, and she owns her car, a 1930s roadster. She has very big shoes to fill in the schoolhouse as the kids very much loved Miss MacGillicuddy, but she possibly gets to meet and encounter more of the Little Rascals in her classroom than any other teacher there. She only really comes close to getting angry thrice: once when the kids get their school answers from The Minstrel And Blackface Joke Book and when they went to great lengths to keep her brother Jack, whom they thought was her fiance, from seeing her, and again when Breezy Brisbane goes to extreme efforts to get himself expelled.
Beyond that pretty head, Miss Crabtree seems to balance her life evenly between compassion and wisdom. When she first meets Jackie Cooper in Teacher's Pet, one of her students, he is so smitten by her that he willingly tells her all about the pranks he and the others have in mind for her as the new teacher. Listening intently, she never once she reveals herself until after school has started, and then she solemnly confiscates all the gadgets and paraphernalia planned for her. To ease over this rocky start, she has an ice cream party at the end of the school day and even shares it with Jackie after his humiliation forbids his ego from returning. It's a similar pretense Miss Jones uses when she starts at the new bigger school building created much later in Bored Of Education.
Not much is known of Miss Crabtree's past. She has a brother named Jack Crabtree who comes to visit her in School's Out. Since her job can't give her much money to get her own home, she accepts room and board at the home of Jackie's parents. This not only makes her more accessible to her students but makes her the target of infatuations from Jackie and Chubby.
Children and education are very important to her. She helps to find a family for a runaway named Stymie who turns up in Little Daddy, and when the truancies become a bit too frequent, she goes to the story-telling Old Sea Captain for help in Shiver My Timbers in driving the kids back to class instead of using a strong-armed approach to urge them back.
Miss Crabtree doesn't stay long as a teacher in Greenpoint, serving there only three years. She has Jackie in her clasroom for the 1930 to 1931 semester, Brisbane in her 1931 to 1932 semester and Wheezer in her 1932 to 1933 semester. In 1933, she is replaced by a former student, Mary Kornman, in Fish Hooky. This has got to be a bit of a heartbreak for kids like Spanky and Tommy who possibly started out with her at the one-room school house later replaced by the bigger more modern building. In the interim, the kids briefly attend Green Street Grammar School.
Quotes: "Are you children trying to be funny?" - Miss Crabtree in School's Out
Notes/Trivia[]
- Miss Crabtree is one of the few adults to have appearances in the later Rascal spin-offs.
- Miss Crabtree, Uh-Huh, Kennedy and Elmer are the only recurring characters from the original series to be repeated in the 1990s "Little Rascals" films.