Mincey’s Musings
Year Two, Week Twelve

When I was in first grade, Ms. Hazel Butcher gave me the teacher’s edition to some of the old reading books. One of my greatest regrets in life is that I let two brats bully me into giving them those books. It turns out they are one of the things that can’t be found on Amazon.

It took me until fourth grade to work up the nerve to ask a teacher for a book to take home for my very own. At the beginning of our fourth grade year, Ms. Wanza Sharp’s room had termites in the bookshelves. She gave me my first dictionary, and I still have it. It was missing both covers and several of the beginning and ending pages, but what a treasure I thought it was! I once tried to make a cover for it out of cardboard covered with the remains of a tattered shirt and duct tape, but it didn’t work out.

Ms. Sharp also gave me and several of the other students very worn and tattered copies of an older edition of the fourth grade Modern Mathematics Through Discovery textbook. My particular copy had all the pages, but it was bound on the spine with electrical tape. That book came from the days when the textbook was the curriculum, and new books didn’t come along very often. Those books had to last, and if electrical tape would hold them together, so be it!

I noticed that Ms. Sharp seemed to have lots of old textbooks on her shelves that were never touched. I remember how timid I was about asking her for the first book. She gave me several throughout the year I was in her class. She gave me an old spelling book and an old social studies book that she had used as a teacher’s edition. In red lead pencil, she wrote the questions she would ask the class in the margins. That book, Many Lands, took students on a trip around the world. If I ever get rich, I’d like to retrace that trip and see how different the world is now than when the book was published.

How I treasured those books! I played school with them for years, and still have every one. I love to turn the pages and think back to those peaceful days when there was so little with which to be concerned.

Ms. Sharp would not give away a teacher’s edition to any book, no matter how long they had been out of service. She had a teacher’s edition to an old reading book that I absolutely craved. One day Ms. Leah Wolfe came into our fourth grade class and brought me a reading book, Wonder and Laughter. Though not a teacher’s edition, that book had the best stories. I have always believed that Ms. Sharp talked to Ms. Leah about how much I wanted a reading book for my own.

I had better luck when I went to high school. Mr. Sam Jennings gave me a pupil edition of an old eighth grade reading book, A World of Experience. At a later time I acquired the teacher’s edition. School reading and literature books used to have the most wonderful pictures and stories, and they were interesting, not like so much of the uninteresting nonfiction that kids are bombarded with these days.

Mr. Harrell Edmondson also gave me the teacher’s edition to a world history book that I don’t think was ever adopted by the Union County Schools. I enjoyed the fact that it was a teacher’s edition, but I have never cared for world history as a subject.

When I was a junior in high school, I worked for Ms. Geneva Ailor to get out of study hall. I more or less forced myself upon her—I’d just show up every day and offer to grade papers, and Ms. Ailor always had papers to grade and didn’t have the heart to banish me to Mr. Hartsell’s study hall.

Ms. Ailor had the teacher’s edition to a social studies book that I had used to play school with for years. I practically begged for that book, but she wouldn’t part with it. I think teachers use particular books so much that they become attached to them and find it hard to give them away.

I always held a low grudge against Ms. Ailor for her stinginess when it came to that book, but she gave me a far greater gift. At the end of the school year in which my father died, Ms. Ailor gave me a leather bound Bible with my name on the cover. She wrote inside: PRESENTED TO Ronnie Mincey BY Mrs. Ailor in memory of your father and for all the good work that you have done for me DATE May 25, 1982.

Part of the outer leather is gone from the front cover, and there are some tears in the back cover, but of all the books I have or ever will own it is my greatest treasure. Mrs. Ailor died last week, but she lives on through His Word that she shared with me at a vulnerable time in my life.

My favorite rooms in the Maynardville Elementary and Horace Maynard High schools of my youth were the libraries. Gone are the days when I wanted books of my own so bad that I drew pictures of the spines on notebook paper and taped them to my bedroom walls. I have amassed quite a collection of books over the years, some as treasured as my dearest friends. I never dreamed I would live to see paperback and hardback books become almost obsolete relics.