Alice Rickman Cathey

Honoree:
Alice Rickman Cathey

Submitted By:
Laura Cathey Hart

My grandmother’s decision to become a teacher was one of the defining roles of her life. Ours was a small town, and when I was a child, it seemed as if every adult I knew had been her student. “I knew your grandmother,” they would tell me. “She was my English teacher … she was the most wonderful teacher I ever had.” And just like that, I would be accepted as “good people” because she was my grandmother. From a young age, I realized that teachers were special, that they had an impact on people’s lives in a fundamental way.

Alice Rickman Cathey was born in 1918 and grew up in the mountains of Franklin, NC, the elder of two daughters. Her parents owned and ran the local store selling everything from food to dresses; her father was also the postmaster. Alice’s decision to become a teacher was probably an easy one. In the 1930s in Appalachian North Carolina, a woman’s career choices were limited. Her decision to attend college is a testament both to her parents’ dedication to education and to her own tenacity. She started her studies at the Western Carolina Teacher’s College in Cullowhee, NC but later transferred to Winthrop University. Her first teaching job came about through the intervention of her uncle, who lived in nearby Haywood County, NC, and knew of a teaching vacancy at Bethel School. She eventually met and married Daniel “Ray” Cathey, settling with him in the Pigeon Valley area of Haywood County.

Alice had two sons, and as women did back then, she quit work to stay and home and raise her family. She was home with them for four years, and she might never have returned to teaching. However, when her oldest son Kenneth started first grade—there was no kindergarten—the principal of Bethel School called her and asked for her to come back to work. I can’t, she told him, Robert (my father) has another year before he begins school and there is no one to look after him. Bring him with you, the principal said, he can go ahead and start first grade this year if you’ll just come back and teach for us. Isn’t that incredible? No test to see if Robert was ready to start school, no policy to check or verify, no application for Alice to complete. Just a barter of sorts: we will take care of you if you will help take care of us. And just like that, she went back to work. Bethel School housed grades one through twelve, so Robert and Kenneth attended the lower school while Alice worked teaching 8th grade, teaching English and Humanities. Eventually she moved to the high school teaching grades 10-12.

There was only one car in the family and Ray needed it to get to work, so most days Alice and the boys caught a ride to school on the school bus. My father has memories of the family climbing on the school bus at 7:10 in the morning and then the bus stopping to pick up students, teachers, and cafeteria workers as they rode through Pigeon Valley. There was no misbehavior because the teachers rode the bus to school with the students; in the afternoons, teachers got rides from co-workers if they needed to work late, but often teachers rode the bus back home as well, lugging a stack of papers to grade in the evenings. How many connections were made through this simple act of transportation? Teachers knew where students lived. They knew when a student was sick or something was wrong because the student wasn’t on the bus. They knew what kind of morning a student had at home before school because on the bus ride they saw a student laugh or cry or talk or sulk. They knew when a student had missed breakfast. It was through actions like this that helped form a sense of community around the school, made the school and the people who worked there so important in the lives of their students.

Since I was also an English teacher, my grandmother loved to tell me stories of the way things were when she taught. Once when I was still teaching in public school and my grandmother had retired, I had a semester that started with 34 students in one class of junior English and 12 in another. I was bemoaning this to her, complaining about balance of class sizes. “I do not understand why I can’t have about 20 students in each section!” I grumbled. “34 students are way too many to have in one class.” My grandmother peered at me with an amused, wry look. “34 is a lot,” she acknowledged in a firm tone, “but it is not too many. I had 35 or 40 in most of my classes.” I was stunned. “You had 40 kids in one class? In HIGH SCHOOL?” I asked, sure that she had misunderstood me. “Oh, yes,” she responded, “one year I had a class with 42 students and 40 of them were boys. That was an interesting year,” she chuckled to herself, remembering.

I decided that I needed confirmation of this 40-boy-classroom, so I asked my father. That was another thing that was so different about school back then—my grandmother taught her own children. My father had her for his teacher four times, for various classes of English, History, and Humanities. She also taught my uncle, my aunt, and most all of their friends with no question about favoritism ever raised. My father maintains that it was not easy having his mother as his teacher although she never bugged him about homework, never nagged him about tests. If he did poorly, it was up to him to turn it around. When she was in the classroom, she was his teacher first and then his mother. How in the world did she manage such a big class where most of them were boys? I asked my father. “She was pretty tough,” he confessed. “Her nickname was Nightmare Alice. And you can believe that if you misbehaved, it was like living in a nightmare.”

My grandmother had a lifelong love affair with the Humanities. It was her good fortune to teach subjects she truly enjoyed and took pleasure in exploring. From a small classroom in the mountains of North Carolina she shared the rich worlds of art and history and philosophy with country boys and girls, many of whom had never travelled far from their homes. She corrected their English, read their stories, and encouraged them to go to college. These interactions literally changed the lives of many of her students. In 2011, I was attending a community book talk in Kannapolis, NC and noted on the program that the evening’s keynote speaker was a retired professor with a Ph.D. originally from Canton, NC. He had spent his professional life in academia, eventually becoming an assistant chancellor at a large institution. When we chatted afterwards, I asked him if he might remember my grandmother. He looked at me with surprise. “Are you Alice’s granddaughter?” he asked me. “Let me give you a hug. Your grandmother is the one who inspired me to go to college. She wrote letters for me to be admitted and helped me get a scholarship. I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for your grandmother. She was a fine lady.” That kind of story has been a common refrain throughout my life.

Alice Cathey taught for 34 years in all, retiring from Haywood County Schools in 1978. Those years were spent first at Bethel School, and then at Pisgah High School when it opened in 1966 after consolidation. She served as a teacher, advisor, mentor and advocate to hundreds of students during that time. She was, and continues to be, a reminder of the enduring power and impact of teachers. Her students are her greatest legacy.

Written by Laura Cathey Hart on behalf of the family of Alice Rickman Cathey

Kenneth and Barbara Jean Cathey, Robert and Julie Cathey, Mark and Catherine Cathey, Walter and Laura Cathey Hart, Mark and Robin Cathey Bennett, Jennifer Cathey, John Cathey