Evelyn Mills, beloved, tough Memphis teacher, remembered for believing in her 'kids'

Evelyn Mills, who died Jan. 2 at the age of 100, was the best teacher I ever had.

The smartest? Maybe. The funniest? Arguably. The most effective? Definitely.

When you took a class with Evelyn Mills, not only were you required to read the Iliad and the Odyssey, you enjoyed the experience.

“My every impulse bends to what is right.” That’s from Homer’s epic poem, the Odyssey. Evelyn Mills seemed to live by that credo.

“Miss Mills,” as the students in her English and Latin classes at White Station High School called her, died less than a month after her best friend and colleague, Irma Roberts, the longtime White Station librarian, who died Dec. 5 at the age of 102.

I think if I had to deal with large numbers of kids and teenagers day in and day out, year after year, I’d end up in an early grave rather than as a centenarian in a senior center. But young people must be a tonic for dedicated educators, like “Miss Mills” (actually Mrs. Mills) and “Miss Roberts” (also actually Mrs. Roberts), as most students called them. (Perhaps "Mizz Mills" or "Mizz Roberts" would be a more accurate rendering of that slurred, ambiguous honorific that split the difference between "Miss" and "Mrs.")

The two women went whitewater rafting out West while in their 70s, and traveled to Europe together. At the end of their lives they even lived across the hall from each other, at the Town Village Audubon Park retirement community — Mills in Room 219, Roberts in Room 220.

After decades in Memphis public schools, maybe they felt at home in buildings with long hallways and rooms with numbers and meals served on trays.

Mills also coached high school basketball in Arkansas, for a spell and was a longtime Girl Scouts leader.

“She just loved kids,” said Mrs. Mills’ daughter and only literal kid, Barbara Fisher, 75, a retired nurse practitioner in Collierville. “Any little person, she had a fit over 'em.

“She talked all the time about ‘my kids.’ Doctors, lawyers, my goodness, she taught so many. She’d see ‘em in a store or out in a restaurant and say, ‘There’s one of my kids.’ She loved ‘em and never forgot ‘em.”

'Believe in yourself'

The feelings were mutual. In a 2004 column for The Commercial Appeal, Wendi C. Thomas — a member of the White Station Class of 1989 — described Mills as “the educator I’ve thought about most since I graduated from White Station.”

“She was hard on us, she could be mean as a snake, but I think what I treasure most about Miss Mills is that she believed we could do the work,” said Thomas, who founded MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, a nonprofit news outlet, after leaving The Commercial Appeal in 2014. “It was really critical for us as high schoolers, with all our emotions and drama, to have someone who believes in you before you believe in yourself.”

At 5-foot-7, "she was a tall lady, so when you walked down the hall you noticed her," said Bob Plunk 71, retired director of development for the Methodist Healthcare Foundation, and a 1970 White Station graduate. "We always invited Miss Mills and the other teachers we respected to our reunions."

The future Evelyn Mills was born in Macon, Georgia. Soon after, her parents relocated the family (Evelyn had three brothers) to Memphis, where young Evelyn Hurst attended Snowden School, Central High School and Memphis State College, as the institution was known when Evelyn graduated in 1945 with degrees in Latin and Spanish.

She taught in Brownsville, Tennessee, and then in Osceola, Arkansas, where she also coached the girls’ basketball team, married and had a daughter. The marriage didn’t last, but Mills’ dedication to teaching did. She and baby Barbara returned to Memphis, and moved in with Mills’ widower father, Wyatt Hurst, a deacon at Calvary Episcopal Church.

After a brief stint at Kingsbury teaching Spanish, Mills transferred to White Station in 1959, to focus on Latin and English. She earned numerous teaching awards and honors — including a Fulbright scholarship that enabled her to study at the American Academy in Rome, and a 1982 Memphis Rotary Club citation as a "Teacher of the Year" — during a tenure that ended when she retired in 1988.

She was active outside the classroom, too — an inveterate volunteer and traveler and camper.

At Calvary Episcopal Church, she was a Sunday School teacher and a Lenten Waffle Shop volunteer. She volunteered at the city's "Wonders" exhibits. She was a volunteer for the Homework Hotline, explaining in a Commercial Appeal interview in 1999: "I didn't want my brain to deteriorate. If you don't use it, you lose it."

She could be as stubborn overseas as at home. “Once in Rome, a youngster tried to snatch her purse by speeding by on a Vespa,” Fisher said. Mills held on, and remembered the experience in these words, according to her daughter: “It was inconvenient, but at least I got a chance to see how Italian hospitals work when they splinted my broken finger.”

So, yes, she was feisty. “If you asked her opinion,” Fisher said, “you had better be ready for what followed because she suffered no fools and gave an unvarnished version of her truth.”

Energy and enthusiasm

I only had one class with “Miss Mills,” a 9th-grade English class; but it made a big impression. I mean no disrespect to the many determined and intelligent and excellent teachers who tried to capture my interest before and since (including certain “celebrity” and “leaders in their field” professors at Northwestern University) when I say that Evelyn Mills was the most successful of them all.

The English class was what might be called an “honors” class today, for students already somehow classified as “good readers.” (I guess that’s why only three boys were in the class.) A somewhat wiry figure, Mills suggested the Edna May Oliver stereotype of the “spinster” schoolteacher; we thought she was ancient. But she was a dervish.

In that class, we read — and explored — the Iliad, the Odyssey, Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” and “A Tale of Two Cities,” by Charles Dickens. And we — or at least some of us — loved them.

We didn’t skim the texts; we didn’t do as little as necessary to get by; we didn’t act weary or cynical or too cool for school; we didn’t disrupt the class with clowning (although witticisms were welcome, if they actually were witty). We embraced Mills’ energy and enthusiasm. The result was a unique and rewarding educational experience, one that even very few of my college classes would equal.

I am a member of the White Station Class of 1977, so, for me, 9th grade ended in 1974. So almost a half-century has passed since I was in Miss Mills’ class, wearing long hair and bell bottoms, and finding excitement and urgency in stories attributed to a Greek poet who lived 27 centuries before.

After all this time, I can't really recall how Miss Mills translated her love of teaching into an educational strategy, but I know she never talked down to us.

Services for Evelyn Mills are at 11 a.m. Jan. 27 at Calvary Episcopal Church; Canale Funeral Directors has charge. The funeral will follow her friend's by two weeks: Services for Irma Roberts are at 3 p.m. Jan. 13 at Christ Church Memphis.

The Calvary service should be just-so. In addition to working at the Lent-season Waffle Shop, Mills was on the church's "altar guild," the lay organization that helps prepare and maintain the sanctuary altar. "She was very particular," Fisher said. "She left explicit instructions to make sure the candles are straight for her service."

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Evelyn Mills, beloved Memphis teacher, dies at 100. How she's remembered