'A Painted House' brings former teacher, student together

JACKSON, Mo. -- While teaching English at Central High School from 1940 until she retired in 1976, Miss Inez Smith was among the school's legendary women teachers along with her sister Irene Wright, the late Alene Sadler, math teacher Grace Williams and the late school librarian Mildred Vogelsang.

They and others were unforgettable presences during that period.

"I really wanted to be Inez Smith," says Julia Jorgensen, a former student of Smith's who now is the Central High School librarian. "I wanted to be a lady. We had a lot of ladies."

Well on her way to ladyhood herself, Jorgensen organized United We Read, the February-long schedule of almost daily talks about "A Painted House" to get the community reading and talking about the same book together. To honor her former teacher, one of Wednesday's daily discussions of the John Grisham novel was held at Monticello House, the comfortable retirement home where Smith now lives.

Fourteen residents and some staffers gathered in the retirement home's rec room to discuss the book, set in 1952 in Arkansas cotton country, and its remarkably accurate re-creation of that time and place.

The residents made connections quickly.

Smith began her teaching career in Clarkton, Mo., in Dunklin County, country much like that described in Grisham's book. "I taught in a cotton-picking school," she quipped, recalling that students were excused from school for two weeks each year to pick cotton.

Some residents had picked cotton. "It was murder," said Ola B. Bollinger, a former Oran, Mo., resident.

Everybody remembered outhouses, a source of some levity in the book.

"You knew the outhouse got turned over every Halloween night," Bollinger said.

Cardinals on radio

Listening to the St. Louis Cardinals play baseball on the radio, seeing television for the first time, and church dinners on Sundays are all important parts of the book. Before having a television, one resident recalled watching one in the window at the Lorberg appliance store on South Sprigg Street in Cape Girardeau. Former KFVS-TV weatherman Don McNeely was the person he remembered most from those days.

At Central High School, Smith taught Don McNeely and his brother, Jerry, who went on to become a theater professor and screenwriter.

In January, Jorgensen went to Black Oak, Ark., the town where "A Painted House" is set. Pop and Pearl's, the store where 7-year-old protagonist Luke went on Saturdays for a Coke and sometimes a Tootsie Roll, was torn down. But Jorgensen found their names written in the concrete foundation. And she discovered that Pop and Pearl Watson's daughter lives in Jackson, though she doesn't know her name.

Luke idolizes Stan Musial, the gentle man who was the Cardinals' star ballplayer. Jorgensen named her son after Musial.

Smith grasped the significance of Luke's mother, whose family had to struggle each year to scratch out a living from the cotton fields, wanting to live in a painted house. "It's more civilized," she said.

Grisham simply wanted to tell the story of his early childhood in "A Painted House," and the detail of his recall amazes her. "I just love every word," she said.

United We Read pleases her, too. "What a fine thing to get people reading again," she said.

Seventy years after graduating from Southeast with a major in English and minor in biological science, Smith is a nicely coifed, well-dressed woman who still tries to read every day.

"It's so easy to sit back and let TV take your time," she said.

Former students recall that Smith's hair was always just so, and she always wore heels.

"She looked perfect every day," said Jorgensen, who Smith had as a student at the end of the 1960s.

Smith was beloved as a teacher who was both insightful and demanding, Jorgensen said.

"You had to have read the assignment, and she expected you to participate."

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182