Literacy Council Founder looks back on what drew her to Whiteville and how teaching people to read became a passion.

By NICOLE CARTRETTE
Staff Writer

It’s not the three “R’s” that brought her to Whiteville or that have kept her here.
Former schoolteacher and Columbus County Literacy Council founder Ruth Whitley’s story of how she came to call Whiteville home is more about the three “L’s” – love, life and literacy.

On love

“My ambition as a teenager was to be an old maid school teacher up until I met Horace Whitley and he made a mess of the whole plan,” Ruth said with a smile.

One of five siblings who grew up on a Nash County farm feeding pigs and cropping tobacco, Ruth set out to begin the “process,” as she called it, of becoming an old maid but would meet Horace in college and marry him a year later.

While Ruth was embarking on her teaching career in the early 1940s at Red Oak High School were she graduated, Horace was called into service. Ruth would remain at home with her parents until 1944 when Horace returned from World War II.

On life

Years later, with “old maid school teacher” dreams long behind her, Ruth would support Horace’s move to accept a promotion in the banking industry and move their family to Whiteville.

“The bank brought him to Columbus County. I came along for the ride,” Ruth said.
She traded in teaching for motherhood and became a homemaker but it would not be long before Ruth would be drawn back to teaching – this time one-on-one.

On literacy

Ruth received a call from an official with vocational rehabilitation in Raleigh who contacted her after she attended a training session for literacy tutors with the WMU at her church. The official asked her about helping a client learn to read.

Ruth said she had “no earthly idea” that in taking on her first student she was starting something that now, more than 25 years later, she can’t give up.

“The first student was only until I found the right tutor for him,” Ruth said.
She discovered only a few weeks later she was “the right tutor.”

“In two weeks, no one could have taken him from me,” she said.

Word spread quickly and soon Ruth received a second call – this time from a friend of her student.

“I heard you’re teaching my friend to read; I need to know how to read too – can you teach me?” the second student pleaded with Ruth.

More calls followed and the need for reading tutors emerged an even greater one.
Council organized

“We decided we had to organize,” Ruth said. She contacted the Cape Fear Literacy Council and on Nov. 1, 1979 the Columbus County Literacy Council was forming.

Tutoring from her home until 1988, the Council’s next location was in the basement of Whiteville City Hall. Later the organization would move into a rented space at the Waccamaw Building.

“I looked at this role as a mission from God,” Ruth said, pointing out the council has always made it worthwhile.

“I was not able to grasp just what it meant to be an adult nonreader,” Ruth said.

Made a difference

She recalled her reaction to a student thrilled to have left his wife a note telling her where he would be. “She just had to guess where I was before,” the student told Ruth.

Ruth remembers asking one student, “How do you spell your name?”

“I don’t know,” the student replied.

“These are things we take for granted,” Ruth said. “They are very smart people – they just can’t read.”

While many students have gone on to obtain a GED and it is the standard by which many grant committees measure success, some of the organization’s student goals simply don’t fit into those formulas, Ruth explained.

At 84, one student wanted to learn to read her Bible. She started on a pre-school level and worked her way up to additional skill levels.

“I can read my Bible now; you may go teach someone else,” the woman told her tutor.
“You have to know what their goal is,” Ruth said, and she demonstrated that having a positive attitude in uncertain times doesn’t hurt either.

“I have a student who calls and reads to me every night,” she said, pointing out it began when her husband Horace was ill and she was unable to meet with the student in person.

“There is no way we can do that over the telephone,” Ruth thought, but learned: “Oh, but there is.”

Ruth tutored the student throughout Horace’s illness.

“It was hard for me to be here and see the need and not meet it,” she professed.
Funding cut

The council is now facing thousands in funding cuts through a community college grant, she said. While Ruth measures success in the difference in individuals’ lives she realizes society is results-oriented and there is more emphasis placed on students obtaining GEDs.
Committees making grant decisions may not realize for a student who doesn’t know the alphabet a GED is a long term rather than short-term goal, Ruth explained.

The news of the cut comes less than a year after the organization received its national certification through ProLiteracy America – no small feat.

Despite the limited resources and 22 individuals on a waiting list for a tutor, Ruth remains optimistic.

She is grateful to individuals, foundations and local companies that have provided funding to the organization with only two paid part-time employees and the rest volunteers.

“Every dollar now is going to help in a big way,” she said.

Illiteracy rate

Ruth said she is “scared to say” how many people in Columbus County are totally illiterate. Her guess is 20 percent. Over the years, the organization has worked with several students ages 6 to 84 with a portion of them at the start not knowing even the alphabet.

“They just never learned,” Ruth said.

Another 34 percent is functionally literate, Ruth said.

“They can do a few things,” she explained, and pointed out many of them are highly skilled workers.

“When it gets to where they have to read, they are out of a job,” she said.

“It’s needed as much now as it was when (the literacy council) was started,” Ruth said. “As long as you have children who do not read, you’re going to have adults who do not read.”
To find out how you can help the Columbus County Literacy Council through tutoring or making a financial contribution call 642-2442.