Retired Teacher who taught for 56 years - 53 of them in
Memphis and Shelby County - is still teaching and traveling at the
age of 86.
She is Miss Mary Ormond Butler, who was born in Jackson,
Tenn., but spent most of her in (life) in Memphis until she supposedly
retired about a decade ago.
After her "retirement," she taught for three
years in a consolidated school in Barton, Ark., and she still teaches
a Sunday School class in a church in Madison, Ga., where she lives
with a sister - when she's in town.
Right now, she's visiting Mr. and Mrs. W. D. Hanley of
240 South Holmes.
Silvery-haired and pert, Miss Butler says "I liked
teaching boys better than girls, because they are more of a challenge.
There never was a really bad boy, but I enjoyed having boys others
called bad.
"I'd be pleasant to one of these 'bad boys,' give
him something to do, and sell him on the idea that I was in-terested
in him. I never liked 'angel boys' as much.
"I knew how to discipline my pupils — and that's
the most important thing to be a good teacher. I can't tell anyone
else how to do it — but I'm proud that I never had to send a
pupil to the principal. And I always had a disciplined class."
Miss Butler was graduated from the Memphis Conference
Female Institute, now Lambuth College, in Jackson, in 1895, when she
was 16.
When she was 17, she began teaching at Levi
School in south Shelby County, beginning a career in which "I
never missed a day in 53 years."
After five years, she moved into Memphis schools, teaching
in turn at Prescott, Gordon and Snowden and at Memphis Technical High
School.
And during those years, she attended summer sessions and
Saturday classes, was in the first graduating class of Memphis State
University, which was then West Tennessee State Normal College, and
obtained a master's degree from the University of Georgia.
She was athletic, too, and likes to recall that she was
coach for the girls' basketball team at Gordon when it won the city
championship in 1909.
"Ive seen an evolution in Memphis schools,"
she reminisces. "When I went to Snowden to teach, the schools
were just employing physical education directors. And while I was
there, the first P-TA in Memphis was founded in my classroom. I also
introduced the first national honor society to Memphis when I was
at Tech High."
Miss Butler lists among her former pupils many Memphis
"businessmen, bankers, lawyers, doctors and men who are presidents
of their own companies — but I hesitate to name any of them.
So many are dead, now.
"For instance, I taught Connie O'Sullivan, who was
the fire department chief for years. I had a special weakness for
him. I'm Irish, too, you know."
She has a store of memories of incidents concerned with
mischievous children.
For Instance: : "It was unusual for a boy to ask
to leave the room. When one got up and started out one day, without
leave, I barked at him 'Where are you going?' and he answered saucily
'nature calls.' You could have heard a pin drop in the room. But I
Just ignored it and excused him, and hid my smile.
"One time, a mother came to visit her son's room,
saying, `Tommy says you preach the nicest sermon.' Which reminds me,
it makes me so depressed that we can't say prayers in school any more.
Many children never hear a prayer except in school. There's no such
thing as grace at table in many homes — the working parents
go one way and the children another."
Miss Butler, an Episcopalian, a member of the United Daughters
of the Confederacy and the Daughters of the American Revolution, still
teaches Sunday School - to ninth grade students.
"I used to teach a Bible class for old ladies —
but no more. I have no time for fussy old women," she says perkily.