LOOKING BACK Living through the hot summers

— Most of us had a favorite teacher. Mine was Oma Denton. We called her Miss Oma.

She was my first teacher the year I attended a “city” school at Southwest City, Mo.

I was in the fourth grade and had always gone to a oneroom school.

When the other kids discovered I was a country bumpkin, I remember the humiliation as schoolmates seemed to take every opportunity to make fun of me. Each morning as we seven kids tumbled out of my brother’s Model-T, they would be standing out front, laughing, “Here come the Wiggle worms.” I hated my name, Marie Wiggin.

On the playgrounds I felt lonely when kids didn’t want to play with me because I dressed funny, with my illfitted hand-me-downs. But in the classroom, Miss Oma demanded we respect each other.

One of my favorite times of the day was reading, when Miss Oma had us, one at a time, stand beside her desk and read aloud a page or two of a story. Classmates would laugh at the slow readers and shout out the words they stumbled over.

Miss Oma would quietly but firmly enforce the rule to respect each person’s time to read, to give them time to learn to pronounce their own words.

I loved to read and Miss Oma encouraged me. Each classroom in the two-story brick building (that has since been torn down) had their own library. In our room, the shelves probably held about 50 books and I read every one of those books that year. Most were fairy tales or other fiction. In those pages I could imagine myself a beloved princess with everyone looking up to me.

Once, for a personal project, Miss Oma asked each ofus to bring her a picture of ourselves. I proudly brought her my photo. Miss Oma thanked me and promised to return it. She must have forgotten because that summer, after school was out, I got a letter from this special teacher with the picture I’d given her of myself. She told me how much she had enjoyed having me for a pupil and apologized for not returning my picture sooner.

The next school year a bunch of fifth grade girls were standing around talking about Miss Oma, wondering why she wasn’t teaching. I spoke up and told them, ”I got a letter from her last summer.”

My classmates glared at me. One of them said, “I don’t believe you. I never got a letter from her.” I persisted that indeed she had written to me and I explained about the picture.

They never did believe me. And I felt so special, knowing Miss Oma had written ONLY to me.

Marie Putman, one-time Gravette resident, shares her thoughts with our readers twice every month.

Opinion, Pages 7 on 09/15/2010