Together Again

Reunion brings 91-year-old student together with teacher

By Amy Widner

LITTLE ROCK — Wilma Langley of Searcy has fond memories of her first-grade teacher, the pretty young girl who rode her horse to work at Copper Springs' old two-room school house and would often give Langley a ride for the last few miles.

She had kept up with her former teacher, Faye Morris, from newspaper articles and little scraps of conversation over the years, but had only seen her once since their time in the classroom together. Langley hadn't heard anything about her teacher's death, but still, she was more than a little surprised to hear her name called in the waiting room of a Searcy doctor's office in July.

Langley is 91, and Morris is 102, putting their student-teacher reunion at the 85-year mark. She asked a nurse if she had heard correctly.

"But the whole time I was thinking, 'surely that's not her,'" Langley said.

Morris started teaching at 15 and taught for 40 years, mostly in Searcy, but also at Happy Hollow, Garner andGlen Burnie, Md. She's used to running into old students, so it took a while for her to remember Langley, who would have been one of her earliest students. She was 17 when she taught Langley at Copper Springs.

"I remembered all of those things when I got to thinking about it," Morris said to Langley last week. " You'dgrown a lot, after all. You're still pretty, though."

"We've both changed a little," Langley said.

The coincidental waiting-room reunion might not have happened if Morris hadn't made such an impression on Langley as a 6-year-old.

"She rode her horse from Garner to Copper Springs. We would meet at a certain point and she would pick me up and she would take me the rest of the way," Langley said. "She was good to me in school, and I'll never forgether. Plus she had the prettiest horse.

"She was young, but she cared," Langley said before turning to Morris, "I never forgot about how good you were to me. I always wondered about you, and I never had another as good to me." "Well, you were a sweet little girl," Morris said.

If Langley was surprised at first, she soon recovered, applying her still-sweet nature to the situation and enjoying the long-overdue reunion with herteacher. It was the nurses and Morris and Langley's children who were really surprised. Morris' daughter Rose George and granddaughter Jacque Cottrell, who snapped a few photos of the reunion, were there, as well as Langley's daughter Mae Lackey.

The two families have gotten to know each other a little since the reunion, and if Morris' health permits, Langley and Morris wouldn't mind seeing more of each other.

"I hope this is not the last of it," Langley said.

Langley was born Oct. 24, 1916. After school she went on to become a housewife, raisingthree children on her farm five miles south of the old Copper Springs school.

It wasn't until later in life that she started a professional career in caring for others, as a cook at Byrd Haven Nursing Home in Searcy and a livein care provider. She has 10 grandchildren, 17 great-grandchildren and nine great-greatgrandchildren.

Morris was born Sept. 20, 1905, and raised two children in the Garner farmhouse that she had lived in since her marriage at 19. She has six grandchildren, 14 great-grandchildren and three great-greatgrandchildren.

- awidner@ arkansasonline.com

Three Rivers, Pages 107, 110 on 09/07/2008