By CLARA CARTRETTE

My boss used to tell staff members to “clean up your office” but gave up on me years ago. I once jokingly told him that if I was the boss and didn’t have to work with a mountain of papers every day, I could keep a clean desk, too.

I’m a pack rat by nature, but there comes a time when you have to throw out a few things in order to save more “stuff.” Hoarding “souvenirs” during my 44 years on The News Reporter staff has generated a lot of “stuff” and a few weeks ago I vowed to go through it and throw out some. I spent an entire afternoon going through old clippings and photos and eventually settled on throwing out about a fourth of what was in the box.

A couple of weeks later I tackled a smaller box where I found real treasures, most of which I just couldn’t part with. One such treasure was a speech I wrote for the 2000 Tabor City High School reunion, held every year in conjunction with the N.C. Yam Festival. It was a eulogy to Beth Rogers Woody.

I read through it and thought it must be the best thing I’ve ever written. It was not the way I put the words together that made it great, it was the subject of the speech. I admit to being prejudiced.

Mrs. Woody was my beloved senior English teacher and good friend who taught English and French at Tabor City High School for many years. She and her sister, Nell Rogers Fowler, were in charge of the high school chorus and together they brought Broadway to the little border town with the dramas and musicals they produced. Sadly, both are now deceased.

Beth Woody was probably the reason I have spent the past 44 years working at The News Reporter. I learned the day I was hired that I got the job on her recommendation.

I had been secretary in Principal Randall Burleson’s office on the Tabor City school campus for a couple of years, and when we moved to Whiteville I set out to find a job. I heard there was a job opening at the newspaper office so I went to see Jim High.

It was a busy “press day” and after we spoke briefly he asked me to return Friday morning, which I did. After talking for a few minutes he said I had the job and started telling me about my “beat” in what was then called “women’s news.”

I was dumbfounded; here he was telling me I would be covering all sorts of things and writing feature stories.

“Mr. High, I don’t know if I can do that,” I said, explaining that I thought I was applying for a secretarial job.

“I’ve talked to your English teacher, and she says you can write,” he replied. I told him I would think about it, left the office and went to Clerk of Court Lee J. Greer, who was also looking for a new employee. He hired me on the spot, and I told him I had just been hired by Jim High and didn’t know which job I should accept.

“You couldn’t work for a finer person than Jim High,” Greer said.

When I returned to the newspaper office I told Mr. High that I had also been hired by Lee Greer, and didn’t know which job to take.

“You couldn’t work for a finer person than Lee Greer,” he said.

I discussed the two opportunities with my mother and she leaned toward the courthouse job.

“No, I think I want to work at the newspaper,” I said. When she asked why, I told her that I knew I could do the clerical work at the courthouse, but the newspaper job seemed like a challenge.

So I came to work here on Oct. 21, 1961 with Beth Woody sitting on my shoulder every time I composed a sentence. If she believed I could write, I wanted to live up to her standard. A year later I won my first press award and a few years later I branched out into covering the police, courts, city and county government and whatever came my way.

Thank you, Beth Woody, for helping to make me a better writer.

Here is the speech I wrote about Mrs. Woody for the 2000 reunion, the first reunion after her death:

“She walked the earth to teach, and she did it the old-fashioned way — to set an example.”

Who does that remind you of? As I sat down last night to write a few words about Mrs. Woody, I reached for a book of Shakespeare’s works. I found a scrap of paper with those words — in my handwriting— between the pages. I have no idea when I put it there, and I don’t know if they are words I composed or if they were copied. But I do know they were put there with Beth Woody in mind. Why else would I have put them between the pages of Macbeth?

Yes, Mrs. Woody did teach by example. Oh, she taught Shakespeare, diagramming sentences, gerunds and infinitives, past participles and dangling participles, verb conjugation and everything that goes with senior English; but she also taught love, and laughter, and life.

She made people feel good about before we became a “feel good” world.

I remember entering high school as a shy, and probably a little scared, freshman. But it only took one day to realize I wanted to be a part of what was going on in that upstairs room on the northwest corner of the high school.

That was where Mrs. Woody and Mrs. Fowler held court with the chorus students during sixth period. I signed up, fully aware that I couldn’t sing a lick, but there was something about the way Mrs. Woody said, “You’re a second soprano” that made me feel like a star. That’s the way she was — she always made you feel good. But even better, she made you feel good about yourself.

Mrs. Woody and Mrs. Fowler were the Sister Act. They not only taught us chorus, French and English, math and Latin, but they took us to Broadway without leaving the city limits.

Our high school stars performed in such wonderful productions as “The King and I,” “The Mikado,” “The Connecticut Yankee,” “Amahl and the Night Visitors” and others. These weren’t the typical high school performances, either. They were close to Broadway quality. These performances opened a world for students and townspeople that they might never have known.

Tiny women that they were, Mrs. Woody and Mrs. Fowler had their desks on platforms to give them a better view of their classrooms. Mrs. Woody’s platform was her stage. I can close my eyes and see her moving about that platform, changing her voice as she acted out all the parts of the characters in “Macbeth.”

Most of us couldn’t understand much of Shakespeare’s works by reading it, but Mrs. Woody’s one-woman shows kept us mesmerized for the entire 55-minute class periods and we were always eager to return the next day for more.

We had to learn to recite some of her favorites lines from Shakespeare and her method of helping us was to write the lines on the blackboard. She left out certain words and we had to read the lines and fill in the blanks. Some of you knew Ted Garrell, who dropped out of school and joined the service, I think, then came back to get his diploma.

And you know that he was kind of a self-made comedian. Once when we were studying the 5th scene in Act V of Macbeth, several students had read lines and filled in the blanks. She called on Ted to read “Out, out brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.”

Ted stood up, and with a serious face, recited these lines: “Out, Out brief spot, it’s mullet season!” then sat down quickly. It startled and tickled all of us, and as we tried to stifle our snickers, Mrs. Woody let out a guffaw that could be heard two doors down. We all lapsed into a fit of laughter and I think the teacher across the hall came to see what was going on.

That’s the way Mrs. Woody was. She made learning fun. She laughed with us, not at us. And I don’t remember that discipline was ever a problem in her classroom. Everyone had too much fun to misbehave.

Mrs. Woody was never intimidating, although she had a way of letting you know when you crossed the line. As a vocabulary builder, she required us to turn in a weekly word notebook. We were supposed to find five new words every week in newspapers, magazines, library books or comic strips — whatever we happened to be reading.

We had to write the definitions and make three sentences with each word. I ran short of time one week and just wrote down the first five words I thought of. Her note, “Clara, you should have already known these words!” was not intimidating, but made me ashamed that she knew I had cheated.

The lessons I learned from Beth Woody and her confidence in me are responsible for my career as a journalist. Without her recommendation, I might not have been hired. And without that endorsement, I might not have had the confidence to tackle some of the tough assignments I’ve had.

I haven’t written many stories that Beth Woody hasn’t been there, sitting on my shoulder, in my thoughts, advising me on sentence structure. I have diagrammed thousands of sentences in my mind to assure that the sentence structure would meet her specifications. She made a difference in my life as I know she did in thousands of others.

Beth Woody was the daughter of a Baptist minister who came to Tabor City when she was a young girl. When she graduated from Coker College, she had an opportunity to spend the summer at the Sorbonne in Paris, but her father would not give permission until she had a job to come back to.

She was hired to teach at Green Sea High School in 1933 on the condition that she would coach the basketball team. Five years later she began teaching in Tabor City and retired in 1972.

She married Waldo Woody from Greensboro who had come to Tabor City to teach, but later joined the W.F. Cox Co. and worked there until his retirement. They had two children, Sandy and Lucia. Mr. Woody, who died a few years ago, was a former mayor. Both were active in the Baptist Church as Sunday school teachers and as music directors and she also worked with Bible School.

Let’s bow our heads in a moment of silence to honor Beth Woody whom we continue to love, a woman, a teacher who was so special, so caring, so loving to her students and her fellowman.

We thank You, God, that Beth Woody lived. We thank You for allowing us to cross paths with her and Nell Fowler and all the other wonderful teachers who helped to mold our lives.

Beth Woody will live on in our hearts, our spirit, our minds as long as we live. She implanted in us a love of life, of fellowship, of learning, and all things that are good. Amen