“And that paid for my expense for that quarter,” said Terry, 84.
After one year of college, she started teaching at Hatton Elementary School in 1944 for a salary of $75 a month. At the beginning of her 41-year career, all of which she spent at Hatton Elementary, the school had no indoor restrooms, no electricity, no drinking water and no Xerox machines.
“Our first Xerox machine was run by handle,” she said. “You’d turn the handle one time, and you’d get one copy. I don’t know what year we had electricity and restrooms, but we had to go around to homes and ask for donations for inside restrooms. We went to one woman’s house, and she said ‘I’m not going to give anything because my daughter can go to the bathroom before she leaves and wait until she gets home before she goes.’ ”
When Terry started teaching, Hatton Elementary had six teachers, including the principal, who taught a class. The school had no library or physical education teacher.
“There were 25 (teachers) when I retired (in 1986), and I don’t know how many aides, and I don’t know how many Xerox machines, a librarian and a P.E. teacher,” she said. “We’ve come a long way.”
Terry said she only attended one year of college because her father, John Stewart, lost the money he’d saved to pay her tuition when Lawrence County’s only bank, located in Courtland, failed.
After running out of money for school and returning home, Terry walked to then Hatton Principal Claude Sandlin’s house to see if he had any teaching positions available. Sandlin told her a third-grade teaching position was available because a teacher was retiring.
There were 50 children in Terry’s first class, and 50 to 55 in almost all her classes the following years.
“I didn’t know too much about teaching because I hadn’t had my practice teaching,” she said. “Myrtle Carpenter, one of the teachers, said ‘Doris, if you don’t get a hold of that class, you’ll never be a teacher.’ When I went back in the room, I got up the nerve enough to spank (a student). He was the first kid I ever paddled, and I got so nervous, I had to find a chair and sit down because I was afraid I was going to pass out.”
Terry said she had control over the class after she punished the student, and later had few discipline problems.
During Terry’s years teaching, construction was under way on Alabama 101, which passes in front of the school. Noise from the construction and darkness on rainy days with no electricity made teaching difficult some days, she said.
Terry said teachers didn’t use candles because of the risk of fires.
Terry said her older sister, Ola Stewart Reed, and remarks from a classmate’s mother inspired her to become a teacher. Reed, 16 years older than Terry, taught for 45 years at schools at Hatton and Iron Bridge, and rode in a wagon or on a horse to school.
“Papa would take her in a wagon to where she boarded, and she’d stay the week,” Terry said. “He’d go get her on Friday evening and bring her home. When she started teaching at Iron Bridge, she rode a horse to teach, and one of the men that was a trustee of the school would come get her horse every morning and put it in his barn during cold weather, then bring it back in the evening for her to ride home.”
Terry said that after seeing her sister’s class projects, such as a garden or plants growing in buckets, she decided to become a teacher.
What inspired her most of all, she said, was a question from a woman whose daughter was in her class in high school.
“I knew she (the daughter) was going to college, and she asked me one day, ‘Doris, what are you going to do?’, and I said ‘I’m going to college.’ I was determined to do the same thing her daughter was going to do,” Terry said.
Lawrence County District Judge Angela Terry, who was in Doris Terry’s fourth-grade class in the early 1980s, said she remembers more about the fourth grade than any of her elementary school years.
“That’s probably when I really began to like history, was in her class,” said Angela Terry, who minored in history in college. “One thing I remember so well, is right after we would come in from lunch, she would read from the Bible, or she had a little devotional book or something. Back then, it wasn’t unusual at all.”
Doris Terry said she remembered Angela Terry as a perfect student and “smart as a whip.”
She taught Lawrence County Circuit Judge Mark Craig in Sunday School and taught his brother, Morgan County District Judge Brent Craig at Hatton Elementary.
“Mrs. Terry was sweet to me growing up,” Mark Craig said. “She was an excellent Sunday school teacher. We all loved her and still do love her, and I know my brother thought the world of her and speaks of her still as one of his favorite teachers of all time.”
Aaron Sutton, who was in Terry’s third-grade class, said he remembered Terry paddling him once after someone told her something he’d said, but said Terry was “a real sweet teacher and a good teacher. I’m still close to her and still go see her once in a while,” he said.
credit: Nancy Glasscock
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