A Teaching GEM - Opal McAlister

Instructor, March, 2000 by Robert C. Johnston

Fifty-two years an educator, Opal McAlister reflects on her life's work--and passion

Opal McAlister may be nearing her 95th birthday, but she isn't even close to slowing down. A brisk walker and tireless storyteller, she exercises daily, reads romance novels, and takes no pills. She directs a bridge club at the YMCA in nearby Marysville, Ohio, every Monday and speaks frequently at local schools. What's behind her remarkable energy and longevity? McAlister believes that a lifetime of dedicated teaching--more than half a century--is primarily responsible. "I have a museum of gifts I could show you from wall to wall, and a great number of students who are my friends," she says. "But the biggest thing that I got from my students was the zest, impetus, and urge to live." As she talks, her hazel eyes sparkle with interest from behind pink-framed glasses.

In 1923 Opal McAlister was young, ambitious, and grateful as she took her first teaching job. After completing a one-year teacher-preparation program at Union County Normal School and passing a general-knowledge test, she was hired to teach 38 fifth and sixth graders at Witkins Public School, in Witkins, a tiny town about 40 miles north of Columbus, Ohio.

Just 18 and one year out of high school, she considered the $810 annual salary a fortune and moving to a new town an adventure. Indeed, teaching wasn't a bad life for a woman in the 1920s. For the first time, she had no trouble coming up with 50 cents to see a Zane Grey Western movie. A middy pullover blouse with a pleated skirt sold for $10 at Sears, Roebuck and Co. And $3 a week bought her a room and meals with a local family.

There were drawbacks, of course. After she bobbed her hair during Christmas break, her father warned she'd be fired for rebellious behavior when school officials spotted the midneck cut. "When I was interviewed at the school, I was told I couldn't smoke or date during the week," recalls McAlister. As for the haircut, she concedes, "Yes, I think they would have fired me." Rather than take the risk, she spent the rest of the school year covering her missing locks with a hairpiece.

The educator's first schoolhouse was a two-story, red-bricked building that housed 200 students, grades 1-12, mostly from poor families. Students sat at oak desks that were bolted in rows to hardwood floors. They wrote with pens fed by inkwells. Her main visual aids consisted of slate board and chalk. A rookie teacher with little supervision, she was expected to get through textbooks in arithmetic, reading, history, geography, and agriculture. She favored taking her students on nature hikes and assigning them what are now called "hands on activities" over digesting textbooks.

Her keen memory vividly details the sweeping changes in education dating back to the days when horses pulled the "school buses." While they may seem trivial today, she says some of the most dramatic innovations came early in her career.

Before mimeographs and laser printers, there was the "gelatin board" in the early 1920s. The gadget was used to make copies by tracing an image onto a piece of purple carbon paper, which was pressed against a board covered with gelatin and then transferred to paper for students to use. "That was a marvelous innovation," says McAlister, who traveled 40 miles to Columbus to buy the board herself for $2. ("Teachers still pay for the extras," she remarks.)

She'd find that the world of teaching held many surprises. "The superintendent couldn't get along with boys," says the self-described former tomboy, who grew up sandwiched in age between two brothers. "He wasn't a basketball man, so he asked me if I would take his place as boys' varsity-basketball coach." Such an arrangement was unheard of in 1924-and is rare today. Still, she accepted the challenge, and succeeded.

McAlister would soon stand at the front of another cultural shift. At the beginning of the century, female teachers who married were usually forced to quit their jobs. In 1930, by allowing her new husband to slip a wedding band on her finger, she assumed she was losing more than her maiden name. She was wrong. Instead, her superintendent asked her to stay. "I was never so shocked in all my life as when he said, 'We need you out there,' says McAlister. "After that, they just stopped firing people when they got married."

By 1942, the war sweeping across Europe and the Pacific had drawn in the United States and the dutiful educator from rural Ohio. "One day I was holding a history book, talking about the news, current events, war, and patriotism," she recounts. "I thought to myself, 'Why am I standing up here? Why don't I do something about it?"' In December of that year, 12 months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and with her husband already in the Civil Air Patrol, she reported to the women's Auxiliary Army Corps in Des Moines, Iowa. Soon, she headed a training division where she taught banking, military law, current events, and other subjects. "You name it, I taught it," she says.