Oh yes. She was still teaching. She was teaching under Carl Mills for, of
gosh, she was seventy-one when she quit teaching. Because they kept
bringing her back. Each year you had to, after a certain age, you had to
request to the county to bring a teacher back. And I think Carl brought
her back six or seven years on that one-year, Mrs. Adams will you teach
one more year? And she finally started losing her eyesight and she told
Carl, she said, "Carl, I can't teach anymore." And he said, "You're not
going to do this to me." He said, "You're going to teach as long as I'm
Principal." And she said, "I can't see anymore." She hemorrhaged behind
the retina and had macular degeneration and just went completely blind
the last twenty years of her life. But
Page 20 loved kids
and the greatest story ever, and I've told it so many times about what a
teacher can do to a child. There is a Hodges family in Cary. And I
coached two of them, Joe Hodges who's about six two, two hundred seventy
five, Lindsey Hodges who's about six something, three hundred. And then
there's little Horace who's about six three, about three hundred pounds.
And all of them played football for us when I was coaching at Cary. But
little Horace was in my mother's third grade class. And she said,
everyday for the hundred and eighty day term, the last thing that
happened, little Horace would walk up, he's a third grader, so he would
grab her around the legs, and he'd say, "Mrs. Adams, I love you." And
she would say, "Horace, I love you." And that story and that chemistry,
and Horace came over the other day. And I said, "Horace, every time I
look at you or hear your name, I think about my mother saying how you
came up and hugged her one hundred and eighty days and told her you
loved her." And he said, "I still do." And I thought that's the neat
thing about teaching. That was a sweet story. But she taught third,
fourth, fifth, sixth grade for thirty years, I guess.