And Sometime Your Teachers Pick You

This is my best Paul Harvey imitation.

The year was 1970 or thereabouts. In Orlando, Florida, hippies, demonstrations and the revolution in general were pretty much something you read about or saw on the news.

I think they were building Disney World and we pretty much thought it would be a cool place to work until we found out about their dress code.

At high school, you were in trouble for having your hair touch your collar or having bangs touch your eyebrows (if you were a guy).
For girls, the big deal was how far your hem was from your knee. I was trying as hard as I could to distance myself from the ‘advanced classes’ and fully become part of the surfer group.
Most of my high school did not have air conditioning, which wasn’t fun, but then some of my friends didn’t have central air at home either.
My school was about 99% white and probably 75% redneck, although we didn’t say that back then. Mostly we worried about the big guys from the woods to the east of town.

One day, I walked into my new class of History.
Here is this big black lady, with a monster afro hairdo, loud voice, and very casual demeanor.
We were going to learn black history and we were going to learn things in a fashion I was unfamiliar with. I think you could call it organized chaos. I learned facts, but mostly I learned to like her, and went on to become one of her assistants for the next couple of years. I remember how much I enjoyed just being around her and she seemed like our own smalltown rebel. I would have voted her Most-Likely-To-Get-Fired-From-Her-Job and that made me like her even more.

I later found out that the teacher that made so much difference to a bunch of us white kids in our old school in the east end of town, far from any black neighborhoods, had much more to do. Miss Kegler got married while she was teaching us and that might have been why she was smiling so much when she wasn’t teaching us about the world.






I believe that Kattie Kegler became Kattie Adams in 1971.
(from a news article)
Former Orange County School Board Member Kattie J. Adams lost her battle with a long term illness on Thursday, July 24, 2003.
In 1980 Adams became the first African American elected to the Orange County School Board and served for 20 years until she retired in November 2000.

Before she was elected to the school board, Adams was a dedicated classroom teacher. She began her teaching career at Jones High School in August of 1962 and later taught at Colonial High. Both schools are located in Orlando. She worked more than 38 years for Orange County Public Schools and was the job developer for the Women's Center at Valencia Community College.

During her life she worked with zeal and passion to improve the quality of education for all children in Orange County and across the nation. "We have lost a person who truly cared about our children," said Superintendent Ronald Blocker. "Kattie Adams wanted to make sure all students used their minds, not only to process knowledge, but also to make good decisions in life."