Wilder, Armaithwaite, et al

The summer I was 15, I clerked at the county school system's records department. I catalogued and filed stuff for the sole permanent employee of the office, a gossipy, blowsy, late-middle-aged woman who smoked like a locomotive (at her desk) and kept the window air conditioner--which blew directly on me--set on max cool. I had a sore throat all summer. But that's a Tammy Tangent.

The records I organized were class logs from the 1920s and 1930s. Mountain people nearing Social Security retirement age then often had neither birth certificates nor Social Security numbers. They needed the latter to "draw" the government stipend, and used the school records to prove their citizenship and their existence.

If Bill Smith came to our office needing a copy of the roll at Boatland School for the school year 1927-28, Miss Locomotive up front wanted to be able to put her hands on the school's record book.

The names of those little one-room places of learning: Pall Mall, Double-Top, Roslin. I learned my county that summer. And I discovered my skill and drive for organization that was still sharp in me as little as 4 years ago.

The quality defined me as the most thorough newspaper reporter at my various small dailies, and as a list-driven, keep-my-shit-in-order, make-no-typos public relations editor/writer. I drove my graphic artist insane, except those occasional times when I was proofing a final "blue-line" copy three minutes before the press rolled and found an error in a publication,

Today I'm a girl who simply does the best she can. Which I suppose was always the case for the place I was at the time.

(Pictured: Barger School, near Allardt, Tennessee. The teacher's hair rocks!)