2023.02.16 ELIZABETH HUCKABY plus Class News

Actress Joanne Woodward (pictured here on the left with Elizabeth Huckaby on the right) played the role of Mrs. Huckaby in a made for TV movie based on Mrs. Huckaby's book "Crisis at Central High: Little Rock 1957-58".

Elizabeth Paisley Huckaby, who served as an instructor of English for thirty-nine years, was vice principal for girls at Central High School during the desegregation of Central High.  She documented events within the school as the first black students, the Little Rock Nine, were admitted. Charged with protecting the six female members of the Little Rock Nine, she earned hostility and anger from segregationists within the school and in the community. She wrote her brother in October of that first year, “Things go on peacefully at school, if enforced peace is meant. The force isn’t needed for most of the children… but for the few basically violent and the few more stirred to violence by emotionalism…. [T]he leaders in school and town [are] silenced by physical threats, principally to children, and by economic boycotts.” In another letter, she wrote, “Many of our leading students would be vocal on the other side, if their parents did not restrain them, knowing the danger it might place their children in. I mean physical danger of attack, as well as verbal denunciation. The law-abiding ones are the least protected in this time.”  Elizabeth Paisley was born on April 14, 1905, in Hamburg, AR, to Henry Lewis Paisley, a Presbyterian minister, and Elizabeth Merrel Paisley. She was one of five children.  She once credited her parents with raising her and her siblings to look past race. “Prejudice simply wasn’t in any of our patterns,” she once said in an interview.  In 1930 she was hired as an English teacher at Little Rock Senior High School (later known as Central High School).  Three years after her arrival in Little Rock, she married Glenn T. Huckaby, a longtime educator with the Little Rock School District. The couple had no children.  She remained a full-time teacher until 1946, when she became assistant principal, later called dean of girls.   Her duties included supervision of female students, but she continued to teach, often tenth-grade honors English.  After thirty-nine years of teaching, she retired in 1969.  She died on March 18, 1999, and is buried at Pinecrest Memorial Park.

1956 Class News

Our deepest sympathy to Annette Brown in the death of her Mother. Her Mother lived to be 101 years old and up until the last 6 months of her life, she lived alone.

So sorry to hear that Dixon Dreher has lost his brother.

Bill Hedges has just received a diagnosis of Fourth Stage Pancreatic Cancer. He start chemo treatments tomorrow. As you would imagine, he is very positive and ready to fight. Send him a little love. Let me know if you need his email address or mailing address. It is up to date in the latest September 2021 Directory and probably good in earlier ones. He lives in Quitman, TX.

So sorry to hear that Vernon Newman has lost his sister.

Warren Thompson has been in rehab following a fall and a broken vertebra, but is due to go home today.

I think I've already sent word that Sara Wafer has finally moved to her "forever" home in Forney, TX. If anyone needs her new address, just let know.

1955 Class News

Just ran across this picture of "Christmases past" featuring the beautiful girls from the LRCHS Class of 1955:

And here's the good news, you've only lost one classmate since this picture was taken in 2016! Her sweater says it all. L to R: Martha Harris, Margie Eidson, Doris Ross, Lana Douthit, Barbara King, Lorraine Funk(?), Nikki Polychron, Roslyn Parrish, Mary Thomas, Sally Derbyshire and Ann Bone.

ML