132. Maude Woods, Greensfork Township Teacher

Winchester News-Gazette, Sept., 1981.
By Ken Thomas.


  It's simply impossible to gauge exactly how deep the reach that Maude Woods, now 90 as of last Wednesday, has had into the lives of seemingly innumerable residents of the southern Randolph County area of Greensfork and Washington Townships.
  But one knows that reach certainly is significant, probably moreso than anyone, including Mrs. Woods herself, realizes.
  Talk to someone who's come of age from the communities of Spartanburg or Lynn or nearby and chances are good that either he or she will have known or have heard about the retired school teacher. Or their parents will have known her or been a student of hers. Or their parents' were. Or both, or, quite possibly, all three.
  "It seems like she's been a teacher to just about everybody here," notes Maxine Parrott of Parrott Rest Home in Lynn, who owns the apartment building where Maude Woods currently rents. To further illustrate the point, she notes that she herself was once tutored by Mrs. Woods in the old Spartanburg School.
  And, according to her former pupils, and as evidenced by the enviable reputation she still retains over 35 years following her retirement from public education, she was a tutor of exceptional qualities.
  "Soft but stern," describes one former student, who places an accent on the "stern."
  "You knew when you had Maude that you'd better shape up," grins Mrs. Parrott.
  At that, Maude Woods smiles momentarily. Her smiles are reserved and not too obvious but they're without reservation and, once observed, exceedingly contagious.
  A tall, thin woman, she could be aptly described as stately/ And yet, at the same time, Maude Woods is anything but unapproachable. One is struck by her grace, which exudes quite naturally from her manner, making the fact that she is 90 years old seem at first unique but soon thereafter only significant.
  Perhaps that pert of her appearance is a carry-over from her teaching days when, according to all accounts, she demanded discipline and respect like a judge with an ever-ready gavel.
  "Sometimes I'm not sure if I was teaching or baby-sitting," she says. That ever-so-slight smile lets one know she is having a little fun with, amidst the truth of, her reminiscences.
  Those memories go back many years, and she sorts through them and selects a few with a mind as sharp as a new raxor.
  "I'm very thankful for that," she says in a moment of quite reflection on her serious illness three years before. "I wasn't well...and it could have affected my mind."
  As it was, she was left physically weaker, drained after expending so much energy fighting the illness, and now her vision is not as good as it was.
  But her inner vision and perception remain very acute, and she displays a delightfully quaint and subtle humor that is a perfect foil to her serious side.
  "Are you going to ask me how much I made for teaching my first year?" she asks. Given an eager nod by the interviewer, she clasps her hands together in delicate thought.
  "I earned $240." She has seen the shake of the head and heard the "isn't that something!" enough times in response to that revelation so that she waits a knowing moment.
  "Isn't that something!" responds the interviewer, shaking his head.
  She goes on to explain that the $240 was for six months in the classroom. It was 1910 at Pinhook, a one-room schoolhouse about six miles southeast of Spartanburg in the extreme southeastern corner of Randolph County. The youngest student was four years old ("the parents were working so they left the child with me:) and the oldest was about 14. One begins to see the light of her previous reflection that she may have been baby-sitting in addition to teaching.
  Then the interviewer notes that $240 back then is not like $240 today, what with inflation and all.
  "I suppose $240 went a little farther then?..." comes the query.
  A smile merges with a soft chuckle.
  She was born in 1891, the seventh of 10 children of Johua and Mary Ellen Bortner in a small humble home a few miles northeast of Spartanburg.
  "I guess it was sort of born in me to teach," she reflects, noting that others in her family became teachers. "It just seemed to me like that was what I was supposed to do."
  After graduation from Spartanburg in 1910, eighth grade was tops then, she began her teacher's training at Valparaiso and Muncie Normal. She first received a teacher's certificate after three months at college, which met the requirements of her continuing teaching the next year. She continued teaching full-time and then going to college during the summer months, in addition to taking some correspondence and extension courses toward filling her degree requirements. She had to borrow money to complete the courses. In between being a student and teaching, she helped run the family household back near Spartanburg.
  Getting to and from school that first year in 1910 required compromise. Her siblings needed a buggy to get to Spartanburg High, and she needed one to get to Pinhook. That meant adopting an alternating plan, whereby each switched from driving the buggy with a top and the one without a top. Maude remembers the every other day in the thick of winter of 1910-11 driving across the frozen landscape in the buggy with no top.
  "And then sometimes the fire wasn't started when I got to the school. The person who was supposed to do it, didn't. It was cold." She recalls starting the fire and then finding herself and her students being smoked out of the building. And the old water pump "was in the coldest part of the state, I think."
  "It's remarkable the things that have changed during that period" between 1911 and today, she reflects. "So many changes so fast."
  During the depression, the township's coffers ran dry halfway through the school year. The teachers at Spartanburg continued teaching without pay.
  Today, Maude Woods keeps busy reading (Lynn librarian Suzanne Brown makes sure she receives books with larger print so that she doesn't have to strain her eyes) and, especially, applying her special talent with crafts - a talent she has perfected since her retirement after the 1946-47 school year. The results of her creative energies, paintings, hooked rugs, wall hangings, grace her apartment. She attends the First Church of Christ in Lynn and meetings of the Merry Lynn Homemakers and the Order of Eastern Star.