Second Grade
Ms. Dorthoy DeBerry / Mrs. Dorothy Venable
Julius Fuller recalled his thoughts about his second-grade teacher: “I went to the second grade, I had, her name was Ms. DeBerry at that time, Ms. Venable, and she was a whole lot younger than the other teachers. They were mostly older ladies. She was maybe in her early 20s or something. She was pretty progressive and you learned a lot at, a faster rate because in first grade I didn’t know anything, but she kind of taught more of what I’d already learned. She kind of made you develop it a little more. You learned personal hygiene and stuff like that.”
Arthur Meadows recalls when he was punished by his second-grade teacher. He said “she whipped with a twelve-inch ruler and she would beat your hands pretty hard… I do remember that I had to write ‘I will not talk in class’ five hundred times.”
Douglas Patterson remembers his time with Ms. DeBerry. He fondly said, “she taught very well, and she was known to me as a teacher of love, that she showed you so much respect as a child and showed you the caring that she had for you.”
Phillip Gravely speaks of his favorite teacher and family friend: Lucy Harmon. He said “she believed in her kids. When you're a small kid, and you’re just trying to grow, she had a way of just letting you believe in yourself. At that age, if you didn’t do something and you didn’t do it correctly, she wasn’t one of these people who would sort of chastise you for getting it wrong. All she could say was, oh, you’ll get it, you can do this, you can do this. She was an encourager.” Gravely tells us a story of his time with Ms. Harmon, “I joke about this, but I told my Aunt Lucy before she died—and she died in, I think, 2013, and I told—I have a confession to make to you. And what it was is that we all had to learn how to tell time. And we would make these clocks out of cardboard. Anyway, she'd go around the classroom and ask us to designate what was the time that was on that clock. Well, she came around to me. I didn't know. [Laughter] But at any rate, I guessed the correct time.”
Joann Releford speaks of the effective teaching methods in second grade. She said “I learned so much in the way we were taught. They used different tactics for you regardless of who you are or what you needed to do. I remember when I was in the second grade you learned to tell time. And that’s when you had the clock faces. [Laughter] You know, the hands, the hour hands, and the minute's hands, no digital stuff. Each week another, a different student–we had a big clock over the door, the entrance door, and the teacher would send you out and she said, ‘go see if you can tell what time it is.’ You go out there and you look at it and if you could come back and you tell her where the hands were, and she would tell you what time it was. By the end of the week, you could tell time.”
Reverend Gary Hash remembers "Miss Dorothy Miller, we used to take her coat. Larry Powell and I used to fight over we'd kiss it, going to the closet. You could smell perfume on it. Silly, silly boys. Fight over a coat. We were just little guys."
Reverend Gary Hash said "I thought I was struggling. Ms. Dorothy will tell you right now, she said I was one of the sharpest children she had. I said, “Man!” I'm thinking that all I remember was struggling. You say I was, okay I'll take your word for it. She said, “You were so sharp.” I said, “Sharp! Man, I was struggling."
George Penn recalls "my favorite teacher was Miss Venable--Miss DeBerry then. I was in her first class when she finished college when she came here to teach. We were her first job, and she stayed here, and she really took care of me. But she was a great, great lady. Still is and looks so young to be almost in her 90s, doesn't she? I asked her to marry me at church the other Sunday, but that's neither here nor there, but she was so sweet to all of us. Back to Joe Reed. Cale, and all of us, she treated us so good. And she taught us this song--John Jacob Jinglehimmer Smith, his name is my name too. Y'all ever hear that? I thought I was telling you something. But we learned that, and we were so proud of singing it."
George Penn remembered Ms. Veneable fondly: "she was a doll. We had at that time a parade here, the MS. Sepia Southwest. You know, sepia’s for blackness. And they had a parade here, and Ms. Venable was the queen. And she got to ride on the float. We all fell in love with her—Joe, myself--fell in love with Ms. Venable. So when she got married, she married a guy that we all liked…. Tim DeBerry. We quit speaking to Tim. We were mad at him. But she’d gotten married. Married. Ms. Venable. That was our girl! Those were the days of Calfee."
Ms. Venable helped George Penn achieve his dreams; Penn said "I’d love to see the hearse drive by. Is that weird, or what? And then I was able to watch them up at our church, up at New Century—they’ve torn it down now. And she finally looked, and said “George, are you feeling all right?” “No, ma'am, you can go home.” Well, she knew I wanted to bust up to the church to the funeral. Finally [one day], she said, “what do you want to do when you grow up?” I said, “I want to be a mortician. A funeral director.” All right. She bought me three suits. I’m in the second grade then. Three little suits--a black one, a blue one, and a gray one. Shoes, shirt, tie, so when there was a funeral, I was able to go to the church and look the part, you know. But she always let me know. Do y'all have any friends like that, who have a desire to do something? No, I don't guess you do."
Dr. Mickey Hickman said "in second grade, we got the young Ms. DeBerry. She was a pretty teacher and all the boys had a crush on her. In first grade and in second grade, we were members of the uh, oh what was that band called? I have to ask Marva. The rhythm band. The rhythm band we had, if you were real, if you had a good rhythm, you could play the drum, [inaudible], and shake the tambourine. I had a stick, two sticks that I hit together, and then I got good and moved up to triangle. I hit a little triangle and stuff. But I remember that first and second grade."