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Bobbie Marie Key (Rourk)
I just noticed that Mrs. Alice Linder passed in March. I remember her fondly for many reasons. First was meeting one of my besties, Nina Eargle. New freshmen, herded into the auditorium at the old (real) high school. The science teachers were assembling their classes & I hear (from Mrs Linder) Bobbie Marie Key. K. E. Y. and I hear this little voice behind me sing M.O.U.S.E. Nina. The first time I walked into Mrs. Linder's classroom she was sticking pins through bugs and putting them on the bulletin board, cackling like a banshee. I'm doomed, thought I. My & my lab partner's desk backed up to hers. She'd plopped specimens into dissection trays & she was gonna demonstrate what we needed to do & look for. She picked up a 7"long grasshopper, thrust it in my direction, and said 'hold this.' I backed up and for the first time in my life told a teacher NO. She didn't push it at that time but for the next two+ years (y'all will remember she took us in for freshman biology, sent us to Mrs. Blakely for a year of chemistry, then took us back for Advanced Bio/anat & phys) she dedicated herself to making me touch bugs. She had a rhinoceros beetle & seemed to think that my holding it would be my salvation. I sucessfully avoided doing same until one day in AdvBio we were all crowded around the lab table copying drawings she had put on the board. She came by & put that damned bug on my hand & I threw it straight up in the air. I do not know who caught it (Butch Spakes, maybe) but I am indebted - she was partial to it & it would have surely shattered into fragments had it hit the floor. I believe this was the point at which she gave up. I still don't like bugs. BUT she pounded knowledge into me and dragged it out of me again at need. I still remember much I learned from her and feel privileged to have come under her influence. She pointed me in directions I didn't know I could go.
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