I've had people over my lifetime who've made a difference in both negative and positive ways. That's the way every lifetime progresses, continuously surging up and down in a kind of heaving sea of gains and losses, joys and sorrows.
When all's said and done, those who touched us in positive ways remain seared in our hearts and minds. I'm speaking of the ripples from another's life that reached deepest inside our own to pass along their wisdom and goodness.
Such was the case of Sarah Yawn of Camden, 103, who died at the Gassville Nursing Center in July.
I came to know the tiny lady when she was spending three days each week at Flippo's Senior Social Center in Johnson. We shared lunch twice and, even at her advanced age, she remained friendly and talkative. Yet I could tell from the way she constantly held her head between both hands that she already was in the process of releasing this world.
I'm happy about those lunches because I actually knew the lady who, while physically diminutive, had a towering reach when it came to influence. And isn't that so often the case with our most concerned and effective teachers from our youth when we are like malleable clay, to help shape our futures and destinies?
Sarah Yawn's students during the years she taught in the Camden School system would come to include former U.S. Sen. David Pryor and Walter Hussman, the publisher of this newspaper. Both men drove three years ago to the unique and popular adult day-care center to celebrate her 100th birthday.
Pryor told me he remembered Sarah from his junior high years as "a remarkable woman who touched so many lives in positive ways, certainly including my own. She knew and genuinely cared about her students and we knew she did. Miss Yawn was a great example of the difference one fine teacher can make in many lives."
"I'll always remember her and feel gratitude for the wonderful, influential teacher she was," he continued. "I know so many others who experienced her warmth and teaching abilities join me in those feelings."
I also asked Hussman for his recollections. "I remember her as my seventh-grade English teacher in Camden," he said. "At the time I realized she was the best teacher I had had up to and including the seventh grade. Now I realize she was one of the best teachers I ever had anywhere."
He said she was the epitome of the intelligent, talented, and dedicated teacher in the 1950s. "Many other occupations were closed to women in those days," he said. "She couldn't have excelled at many other jobs, but fortunately for me and many others, she had one of the most important jobs of all in teaching.
"I remember that twinkle in her eye and that perceptive stare as she sized up what you had learned, or hadn't learned, as a student," he said. "She did it in such a serious but nonthreatening way. She also had a way of encouraging curiosity, and making learning something you wanted to do. Like other students, I think she saw something in me, even as a 12-year-old, that I did not see in myself. She tried to foster that into even more learning.
"I remained fond of her as I moved into the eighth grade and beyond. I remember writing her a letter while I was traveling around Europe with my father, mother, and grandmother a year after being in her class. A lot was happening in the world then: the shooting down of Gary Powers in a U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union, our country and president at first denying it, and Nikita Khrushchev walking out of a summit. I wrote her my observations on all of this at the ripe old age of 13."
Later she would praise Hussman for perceptions demonstrated in the letter. "She saved it most of her life and sent it to me when she was in her 90s," he said. "Some people, often teachers, make a major difference in your life. For me, one of those people was Sarah Yawn."
Many of us have been fortunate enough to have at least one teacher the likes of Sarah Yawn during our formative years. So here's a toast to each of them. And here's another thanks to you, little Sarah, for leaving so much good in your wake after 103 meaningful years among us.
Impressive effort
Wow. I stand to salute the more than 100 residents of Fayetteville who in just under a month managed to collect and timely submit 5,722 signatures on petitions that, if validated by the city clerk, will allow voters to decide if they want the town's deeply divisive Civil Rights Ordinance 119, passed 6-2 by the council on August 20, to stand. Only 4,095 valid signatures were needed to force an election within four months.
This effort is evidence that, when enough are dissatisfied with an unnecessary and agenda-laden decision made by elected officials, they can quickly channel that widespread disenchantment into effective action using paper, pen and determination.
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Mike Masterson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at mikemasterson10@hotmail.com. Read his blog at mikemastersonsmessenger.com.
Editorial on 09/23/2014