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Tribute to My Teachers copyright 2005 by Micki Nellis

My teachers have been the most important people in my life, other than my parents. They gently encouraged me to unfold, learn, and go on beyond them into the world.

I was eager to start to school at age 5, because I knew how important it was. I knew because in the summers when we were picking cotton on the farm in southeastern Oklahoma, sometimes when we rested in the shade at the end of a row, my mother would say "If you go to school and get a good education, you won't have to work this way all your life." Both my mother and father had to quit school sometime between the third and fifth grade.

I was excited when I started off to school with my sisters, carrying my lunch in a syrup bucket. We usually had biscuits and salt pork and maybe a slice of onion. We drew water from the cistern at school, except when it had a rat in it, and then we had to carry water too. We walked the mile and a quarter to school every day, in cold weather, sometimes in the rain. Sometimes the high school bus would pick us up if they had a student out our way. (Nobody objected to this, even though I'm sure it came out of different funding.) Then we would build a fire on the side of the road to stay warm and wait for the bus.

My first teacher was Mrs. Laura Sanders. She taught pre-primer through eighth grade, with all the kids in one room. There were only 12 in the whole school.

Mrs. Sanders lived with her husband and 5 kids in the two-room teacherage. One weekend she had another baby. She brought a pillow to sit on Monday morning and we never missed a class.

The kids sat in rows by grade in our Peabody desks. When it was time for our class, we sat around the teacher's desk in little red chairs. All the other kids could listen to our lessons. We could listen to all the other classes too. This made it interesting for the younger kids. We didn't have to ever be bored because we could listen to the seventh and eighth grade lessons.

When we had done our work, we could go to the table at the back of the room and color or cut out and paste. If we wanted help with our lessons, one of the older kids would help us.

Mrs. Sanders called us up one at a time to do our reading. I went through eight books the first year. I didn't know it then, but the other kids in my class went through two or three books. Mrs. Sanders didn't make a big deal out of it, or have to fill out any paperwork. She just helped each kid learn at their own speed.

The men had built the schoolhouse, the teacherage, and the church themselves, all on 10 acres in the center of the community. The schoolhouse had two rooms, but only one was used during the five years I went there, because the enrollment was only eight to twelve students at any one time. Mrs. Sanders was the most important person in the community other than the preacher.

We had a little library, a cloak room full of books. I remember Zane Grey and Pilgrims Progress. We had Weekly Readers.

Once Mrs. Sanders read from the Weekly Reader Current Events that the Russians might bomb us. This scared me so much I started crying right there in front of everybody. Mrs. Sanders had my sister take me outside for a while to comfort me. My sister explained that if they bombed anywhere it would probably be the big cities so they could kill more people. I had nightmares about them dropping a bomb in our corn patch and all of us waiting for it to explode. I felt like I could get around the snakes, cows that might hook me with their big horns, coyotes, spiders, cold and rain and hunger, but I knew that I was no match for an atom bomb.

Mrs. Sanders had a husband. I guess his name was No Account Luke, because when anyone mentioned him it was "That No Account Luke Sanders." People said he laid up in the teacherage all day and didn't do a lick of work. I guess that was right, because for a while Mrs. Sanders paid my mother a dollar a week to walk a mile and a quarter every day to clean up the house and fix supper while No Account Luke did nothing.

I don't remember why Mrs. Sanders and Luke left. Maybe she got a bigger house and a better job. I hope so.

My next teacher was Mrs. Trula Shipman from Harris, Oklahoma. She had a car, and would pick us up on her way to the school. All we had to do was walk the quarter mile from our house through the woods to the main road and wait. She always gave us time to put out our fire and stomp the ashes.

Mrs. Shipman taught us not only our lessons, but the finer qualities of life. She would have the three girls my age spend the night with her every so often. Here we saw for the first time running water, indoor plumbing, a clawfoot bathtub, electricity, a nice dining table and matched dishes.

Mrs. Shipman would pack all eight schoolkids in her car and drive us to other schools to have basketball games. (The parents didn't have to sign permits.) Sometimes the other schools would bring their bus to our school and she would let out classes so we could play basketball or softball. The other teams usually won, because we only had 6 kids big enough to throw the basketball to the goal. It was a 5-man team playing boys rules. The three boys always played, and the three girls would swap out, one being a substitute.

Mrs. Shipman took us to an Open House at the John Deere tractor supply in Idabel. That was the first time I had ever seen donuts. She let us start a newspaper using the school hectograph. That's a pan of jelly. You put a "master" written in hectograph ink carefully down on the jelly and let it stay a few minutes. Then you carefully peel if off, place a clean sheet of paper in the exact same spot, and let it set a few minutes. Some of the ink from the original absorbs into the hectograph tray, then transfers to the clean sheet of paper. We could only make a few copies of our newspaper before we had to melt down the hectograph jelly and do it again, but that was okay because there weren't many people to buy newspapers from us.

Mrs. Shipman would sometimes read to us from the Encyclopedia in installments. I especially liked the Bambi story.

When I was seven, my father caught a bus to Oklahoma City to find work. We had starved out on the farm. When school was out, my mother helped us pack our clothes into a pasteboard box and tie it with a hay rope. We walked to the Y on the highway, caught a bus to Idabel, and then caught a bus to Oklahoma City. I will never forget that night topping the hill and looking down into the bowl of twinkling lights that was Oklahoma City. I had never seen so many lights or so many people in one place. Soon I was to experience other wonders - the television set and telephone.

Come fall, I enrolled in Rockwood Grade School and I was in another world. There were 30 kids in my room all in the same grade, and two or three hundred in the whole grade school. I didn't know a soul, and I talked different. I had never been around strangers - everyone in my community had grown up together. My teacher Mrs. Mooney was very kind. She showed us how to draw her name - draw a sliver of moon and add "ey".

When winter came and my father couldn't get work, my mother sent a note to Mrs. Mooney that we were moving. Mrs. Mooney walked me to the cloak room, helped me get my things, buttoned me up in my coat and gave me a big hug. I remember that like it was yesterday. I had not grown up around huggers.

For a few years, we went to the city in summer so my father could work at a paying job. In winters we hunkered down on the farm because it cost less to live. I didn't really belong either place now. In the country, I was different because I had been to school in the big city. In the city, we lived in the poorest neighborhoods, I still talked with a backwoods twang, and I didn't know how to make instant friends.

I knew how important learning was (my mother had told me in the cotton patch). No teacher was ever unkind to me. They were always pleased with my learning ability. By now I knew that I could learn, and there was a whole world to learn about. That got me through.

When I was in the sixth grade, we moved to Oklahoma City for good. There I had my first male teacher, Mr. King, at Shields Heights Grade School. Mr. King assigned us to make a speech. I memorized it forward and back, went to the restroom and threw up before it was my turn, then stood up in front of everybody and made the speech, shaking all the time.

When I was 11, I enrolled in the seventh grade at Southeast High School. For the first time, I became aware of class distinctions. On the farm, everyone did the same work, ate the same food, and wore flour sack dresses. In the city, some kids had a nice houses, clothes, food, and money for movies and skating. Some girls went to the beauty shop. Their parents had cars.

My dad worked hard and long hours as a common laborer on construction jobs, even though he was in his fifties by now. We knew that we could not spend money on frivolities because, as Mama always said "Daddy works hard for that money." There was no money to join the band or to buy a Pep Club uniform. I knew exactly how long Daddy had to work for my lunch money every day. I didn't fit in at school because I talked and dressed differently and didn't have money for fun. I didn't fit in on the rough streets of our neighborhood either. I became streetwise, but from a distance. I learned to be quiet and keep my own company.

At no time did I ever feel a teacher looked down on me. They were glad to fill my brain with all the knowledge I wanted to absorb. My reward was good grades. My parents gave me no praise or money for all A's - they expected it of me. After all, I was lucky to have a chance to go to school. Any bragging my parents did was to relatives out of my hearing.

In the eighth grade, I had a life-altering experience because of two teachers and my mother. My mother insisted I enroll in typing. I told her I was never going to be a secretary. She said in that deadpan voice of hers that she didn't care what I planned to be, I was going to take typing anyway. My English teacher, Mrs. Staley, assigned us to write something about Christmas. I didn't know she was being a talent scout and turning them over to the Journalism teacher, Mrs. Liz Burdette. My story was published at the top of page two of the school newspaper, in red ink, with my name on it. The thrill is still with me today.

So the next year when I went to enroll, I told the counselor I wanted to take Journalism. She explained that I couldn't take it that year unless the Journalism teacher had put my name on The List. She got out The List, and there was my name right at the top. From that day forth, I knew that I could write things that people wanted to read, and I could type. I have made my living with my brain and my fingers ever since.

The Journalism classroom had an adjoining office with typewriters and a telephone. We could take incoming calls. We dealt with the newspaper printer and the yearbook publisher and the school photographer. Mrs. Burdette taught us all kinds of things other than school work. She had a way of making her point. I'll always remember one day she screamed "When the telephone rings and it's for me, for God's sake don't ask if it's my husband!"

Mrs. Burdette would tell me when my clothes were ugly or my skirt too long. She would say "I know your mother sews. Ask her to hem up that skirt about four inches."

Another teacher who fascinated me was Mr. Fauble. He taught psychology. One day he hypnotized a student in class to demonstrate post-hypnotic suggestion. He was fired for it.

Mrs. Baker was a mild mannered elderly lady who taught me math, algebra, trigonometry and geometry. I liked all the math classes.

Mrs. Allen taught me government, the constitution and the federal reserve. She took the senior government class on a 10-day bus trip to Washington D.C. On the way to D.C. we stopped a the Atomic Energy Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. On our tour, and they showed us a new material just invented. It was called Styrofoam, and they were looking at how to use it. They thought that maybe they could make insulated coffee cups from it. As we pulled away from the plant, there was an explosion. I don't know what happened - our bus kept on going. I like to tell people I was born before plastic, which is true.

In D.C. I got a taste of politics. Mrs. Allen even took us to a night club and a baseball game - the Washington Senators. She said they were an ideal team because all the tourists came to see their home teams beat the Senators. Mrs. Allen had told us to save our money for one nice meal at a heritage restaurant in Virginia. Here we had elegant food and absorbed history. We also stopped at Gettysburg.

I would think of Mrs. Allen and Mrs. Burdette often when I started my own newspaper and went to D.C. to cover political protests, lobbying efforts, and the farm tractorcade.

Mrs. Staley instilled in me a love of languages. She made Latin come alive with tales of the Romans, Caesar, the slaves, mythology, women's makeup of the day, and Roman plumbing. She got me my first jobs - first as an Easter Bunny at the local shopping center, and then at a bowling alley renting out shoes and bowling lanes.

I graduated number one in my class with a Gold Letzeiser and a $200 Phi Beta Kappa scholarship to the University of Oklahoma. My parents were proud. They and my teachers had done good. ,