The Courier-Journal from Louisville, Kentucky • Page 76

TTlhfis IFemmnmnim Mtn. (CUnfijps IKefinnses ttcm Miss Amelia Saunders stops teaching at 82, hut keeps on working to become Governor of Kentucky. "They yrre my problem children," she laughs. "Always up to some prank or other! I remember that in those days we had the kind of desks that could be pushed over if you worked at it hard enough. And one of them would somehow manage to send his desk to the floor with an awful clatter just as I was trying to put over an important point in a lesson.

"And, of course," she Roes on. "I never did learn to tell them apart no one could. The children would come to me and say that Ed Morrow had done something he shouldn't have done. I would call Ed up to my desk, and he would promptly tell me that Charlie was the guilty party Well, the other children never knew for sure who had been the culprit, and thus I could never punish them, for fear of punishing the wrong twin And there were many others, among Miss Saunders pupils, who were to achieve high position. Famous doctors, scientists, statesmen George Reddish, the man who developed mercurochrome; Louis Longsworth, now connected with the Rockefeller Institute sat in her classroom.

And she has taught three generations of four Somerset families. In fifty-two years, Miss Saunders' teaching methods have not changed as much as one might suppose. Perhaps the fact that they were quite modern at the start has something to do with the case. In those long-ago times, when teaching was still considered a process of KENTUCKY PROFILES rr' 'U' IN A neat brick house on the main street of Somerset lives a little old lady who is the female counterpart the beloved Mr. Chips minus the goodby.

At 82, Miss Amelia Saunders is slim and sprightly, with a twinkle in her eye and the traditionally beguiling smile of the Southern belle. Last spring, after fifty-two years of teaching the very young in the public schools of Somerset, Miss Amelia Saunders retired, her love of children and her sense of humor still intact. Her retirement was really the beginning of a kind of busman's holiday for though Miss Saunders will no longer teach the city's first-graders, she still has a Sunday School class of B-ycar-olds at the Baptist Church. And, believing as she does in the importance of early religious training, she has no idea whatever of returning from Sunday School teaching. Like many another successful person, Miss Saunders stumbled upon her career by accident.

"Stumbled" is perhaps the wrong word. Her life work came down upon her on the high waters of the Cumberland River when a friend, sailing downstream, stopped off at her father's home to ask Miss Amelia, then aged 20, if she wouldn't like to teach the primary department at a private school in nearby Burnside. She finds a career She protested that she never had any idea of teaching, that she was having a very pleasant time indeed in her father's house with several of her nine brothers and sisters still at home, friends all around and beaux coming to call regularly. But the school at Burnside needed someone to help out, and Miss Amelia, ready to try anything once, went off to teach. Before the term was over she discovered that teaching young children was the very thing she had always wanted to do.

She was soon asked to come to Burn-side's public school, but she had no teaching certificate an essential document then as now. With trembling heart and with the promise of her friend, Itcbekah, that she would pray for her all during the examination she decided to come before the judges. It occurred to her that if she impressed these' gentlemen with the importance of their decision in her case, she might stand a better chance of getting a passing grade. Therefore, when asked to write a simple sentence in the grammar examination, she wrote: "I must have a first-class certificate to teach in Burnside school." And, when asked for a complex sentence, she rephrased her dominant idea to read: "If I do not get a first-class certificate, I ennnot teach in Burnside school." Dy Hena Niles DRAWINCS BY CEORCE JOSEPH Mi Saunders in just ns pay loilay a the Has years ago ulirn pIio look over her first children. 'Why shouldn't I he?" she asks.

rve had sueh a good Somerset is very proud of her work. filling young minds with facts as you might fill many jugs with water, Miss Saunders believed that the only way to approach a child was to think as the child thought. "The child can't get up to your level," she says, "but you can, if you try, get down to the child's level." Strangely enough, Miss Saunders never taught the ABC's in the conventional manner. Nor did she use the traditional charts. "I had the charts, of course," she says, "but I didn't use them much Tenches words lirst Instead, she would talk with the children, pick out some simple sentence that came into the conversation and write it on the blackboard.

Thus she taught the children to read words and sentences only later teaching them their letters. Miss Saunders rather feared that she might be lonely when she gave up her life work. But she has been too busy for such nonsense! She has her Sunday School class and her Sunbeam Band an organization of young boys studying the work of the church's missionaries. She is making some of the most exquisite quilts we have seen in quite a spell a periwinkle pattern in rose and blue, a twirling star in shades of pale yellow and soft green, and still unfinished a wonderful quilt in the wedding-ring pattern. "I never had a wedding ring," Miss Saunders laughs, "so I'm making one myself In addition to her quilts, Miss Saunders is making some hand-painted Christmas cards.

She studied art when she was young and she has several nice oils and pastels to her credit. She is also something of a poet a writer of "occasional verse," one might say, who sets pen to paper when some special event must be celebrated or a greeting sent. And, of course, she has innumerable friends, many of them former pupils. "The funny thing is that some of my pupils are far more decrepit than I am," she laughs. "Why, only the other day I was sitting on the porch, talking to a man who had been my pupil.

When he got up to go, here I was, helping him down the steps! And he needed help, too The people of Somerset are very proud of their veteran teacher. You will have to go far to find a family some member of which has not "done time" in her classroom. And she is as gay today as she was when her life work began. "Why shouldn't I be?" she asks. "I've had such a good time Whatever the reasons for the judges' decision, it turned out to be favorable to Miss Saunders.

She got her first-class certificate and remained at Burnside school until fifty-two years ago, when she went to Somerset. There she has remained to this day. When Miss Amelia Saunders first started teaching in Somerset, she was assigned to the higher grades fifth, sixth and seventh. Finally, they let her take the first grade, and after that there was no getting her away from it. For thirty years preceding her retirement, she sat in the same classroom, facing a new crop of first-graders each year forty-odd boys and girls, smart ones and dull ones, naughty ones and well-behaved ones.

And she loved them all. As the years went by, Miss Saunders was able to observe certain changes in her young tharges. The boys and girls she taught last year were a healthier lot, on the whole, than those who came to her thirty or forty years ago. Inoculation against smallpox and diphtheria had reduced these communicable diseases among them, and wiser feeding had increased their stature as well as their general health. "Wex certainly know more about feeding children," Miss Saunders says.

"But, My Goodness! We still have a lot to learn!" Strangely enough, the intellectual development of these youngsters has not kept pace with their physical betterment, in the opinion of Miss Saunders. She recalls that when she started to teach, there were usually three or four children in a class of forty who might be called slow. Gradually that number increased until to day nearly half the class falls in the category of slow or backward children. Such a startling fact requires some explanation, and Miss Saunders feels that this decline can be attributed partially to the fact that, whereas many bright parents are having two or three children in these days sometimes only one the less capable families are still often producing six to ten children. Of course, these same families had large families in the past but so did the intelligentsia.

Thus a balance was'maintained. Today, that balance no longer exists. Morrow twins recalled But every now and then a child of great ability will come from a family ol small promise as if to even up the score. Not that the score needs much help, in Miss Saunders' opinion, for she is as devoted to her dull pupils as she is to her bright ones Arid she would be the last one to show special favor to the talented child of a prominent family. As a matter of fact, she has little use for the extra-brilliant child.

"They are apt to grow lazy," she says, "if they get their studies too easily. Then, in the higher grades, when real work is required of them, they don't do so well The plodder, intelligent but not over-brilliant, is far more apt to succeed in later life than the boy who just zips through his studies." Among the boys and girls whom Miss Saunders has taught, she recalls especially the Morrow twins Ed and Charlie Morrow, the first of whom was Governor Morrow was a problem child and he or his twin would always manage to push over desk, right at the worst possible moment. She brushed the Spanish moss out of her eyes and a Southern story was horn IHJettwceeim ILiiimes fi HHeir KTcrottes By DARBAKA TUNNELL ANDERSON (fx II li? iim mm iiMiiff TTOTffHT hf liiiTM'riirTiSTiJ imprisoned with her mother at Castlcton; the love of Eva Carley that overflowed to the children of Macklin; the love of Curtis Hardin whose work was a protest against traditions that held his heart; the combination of forces that, in the end, made an attack on Castleton's death-in-life spell. The Castleton and Macklin of my book are placed in the lower South simply because the shapes and colors and sounds and smells of that region appeal irresistibly to my imagination. Wherever I look I see the outward and visible forms that state for me the themes of my story.

As we know, all too well, there are many other sections of our country where the structures of our founding fathers suffer from neglect while the superficial is glorified. There are other sections of the country where children are sacrificed to selfishness, where minority groups huddle, frightened and helpless, on the outskirts of our democracy. But, fortunately, outcroppings of democracy, such as those expressed in my book through the efforts of Eva Carley Hardin, are at work all over the country, just as they are in the South. In states as far apart as Iowa and Georgia groups of business men organize themselves to restore the ideals of statesmanship to the operation of government. A Nova Scotian priest guides his fisherman neighbors in setting up a co-operative industry.

Half a dozen Appalachian farmers establish night school of music on their mountainside. A Minnesota village opens its homes to refugee scholars in return for a lecture course. Public schools provide free lunches for hungry children and city slums are turned into model communities. Little by little new forces for good are being marshalled, but not yet fast enough to atone for the smugness and lethargy that brought us to the emergency which now threatens, alike, the children of privilege and the children of privation. Bsrfcsrs Tunnsfl Anderson, author of "The Days Grow Cold," a December Literary Guild selection reviewed on the opposite page, is a former editor of Kentucky Progress Magazine and the wife of Dwight Anderson, dean of the ijniversity of Louisville School of Music.

She is at present recovering from a recent operation. In this account of why she wrote her book, the fails to mention that after she finished her manuscript she consented to its publication only after much persuasion. TmEFORE I was out of school I was writing about JXD Greek Revival houses and plantation gardens. For liva or six years I was in bondage to the South whose records are shut away behind thick walls of boxwood and misty curtains of moss. I ran around Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana, drunk on glamour.

I made snapshots and took notes and accumulated material for a book about the beautiful houses and gardens created by our great-grandfathers and grandmothers. Then, one day, I brushed the Spanish moss out of my. eyes and began to read between the lines of my notes. I decided that if I ever wrote a book it would have to be considerably different from the elaborately Illustrated volume I had planned. For the next few years I wrote a little verse and a lot of advertising while the new book simmered slowly in the background.

Now and then an idea would boil up to plague me and I would try to turn it into a short story. But it wasn't short story material and couldn't be squeezed into that kind of package. Then I came to Kentucky and met Dwight Anderson. He, too, had lived behind the japonicas (camellias, to you) and knew he would be a little homesick the rest of his life. We began to tell each other stories.

The best of my stories belonged to the past; the best of his, to the present. And in and out of all of them memories of singing Negroes ran like an obbligato. Most of my stories traveled down live oak avenues and behind Ejoric and Ionic columns to traditions, that, in one way or another, had been side-tracked from the course on which originally they had been set and had come to a dead end. Consequently, there were the big and little tragedies of those whose needs and ideals had been betrayed. One of Dwight Anderson's stories told about his first concert tour.

One night, after a recital in a small southern town, the local music teacher came backstage. All evening she had been having ideas. She wondered if he would come down in the summer to teach if she could gather together a number of teachers and students who could afford neither the time nor the, money to go away to study. He left his work in New York to go back in June and give lessons to thirty-five teachers and students, many of them commuting from neighboring towns. The woman who happened to have the best piano in town invited the classes to meet in her house.

Those who could afford to pay for lessons, did so. Those who could not afford to pay studied anyway. The important thing was that there was talent that, with proper direction, could enrich the lives of individuals and communities. The next summer and for the three following summers the classes overflowed to the high school building. Through the endless stories we told each other I began to see the novel I was going to write; the looming atmosphere of Castleton's past and Castleton's present; the fate of singing, half-witted Cajy who was locked out of Castletoa where his father was enslaved; the solid photo by W.

DAVIS Barbara Tunnell Anderson poses on the steps of her home, 2430 Valletta Lane, Louisville. bulk of Mittie who made romance of the past and realism of the present; the dreams of the child, Lucinda, that were diverted from the mansion burled in the trees to the realities of her own talent; the love of Emily Reeves,.