Published: September 12, 2009 06:27 pm      

Engligh teacher to be honored at Haileyville

Ten years of teaching Haileyville students spoiled English and Spanish teacher Anadel Wallace.

“I taught 11 years,” Wallace, 87, said. “Ten of them were at Haileyville. Then I taught one year in Oklahoma City, and that did it. I was done.”

She said it was the difference in the students that made her stop teaching altogether.

“People told me going from a small community to the city would be different, but they didn’t tell me about the students,” she remembered.

“There was no respect, they didn’t want to listen. My Haileyville kids weren’t like that.

“I had students there that couldn’t write a paragraph, but my Haileyville students could.”

Wallace and her husband, Dick, lived in a lot of places. He was in the Navy for a time, so they moved around a lot. When he went to work for Wilson Foods in McAlester, they moved here, where she taught at Haileyville High School from 1968 until 1978. After a few more moves, Wallace decided to move closer to her original home of Lexington, settling in Purcell.

Wallace obviously indelibly touched many of her students, prompting them to keep up with her, and stay in touch.

“She was my senior English teacher,” recalled Pam (Giles) Sartin, a 1976 graduate of Haileyville. “You know, we used to dread it when we’d find out we were going to have her, she seemed so strict, we thought she was going to be mean.

“But she just had expectations, and she made an impression. She made a difference.”

Her students want her to know what she meant to them.

“I didn’t know what had happened to her,” Sartin said. “But a classmate, Keith Walker, googled her, found her in Purcell, and said she was okay. He gave me her number and I called her a while back. We had a nice visit.”

Wallace mentioned to Sartin that she comes back to Krebs periodically, because her son is fond of the Italian sausage and makes frequent trips to pick some up.

“She mentioned that she’d like to come to a reunion, but she’d just missed it,” Sartin explained.

Her students are planning a reunion just for her, though. On Sunday, Sept. 20, from 1 to 4 p.m., Wallace will be visiting with her former students and anyone else who wishes to be reunited with her, in the Haileyville cafeteria at a reception in her honor.

“I might go back to teaching even now, if I knew I could get students like I had then,” Wallace laughed.

“It’s the students that I miss the most,” she added quietly. “You wonder, sometimes, where they are and what they’re doing.

“I’ve got some that still call me. I really enjoy it when they do. It tickles me to death. Those visits bring back all those good times.”

Contact Mandy Carter at mcarter@mcalesternews.com.