Location and name changes aside, the Stigler Café (add “in my mind?”) will always be in a rock building on the northwest side of Main Street. You know the place. It’s downtown just east of Bill Sturgeon’s Pontiac dealership and across the street from Dick Shelton’s Supermarket.
In my boyhood, the Stigler Café was cheeseburgers and pregame meals for the football team. Later, it became the place Billie and I took my mother so that she could observe other ladies of her generation. The café served a nutritious lunch with reasonable portions and prices. It seemed that every lady my mother believed I should have known was there.
The visiting. I enjoyed seeing the women who I recalled as the true backbones of postwar Stigler. A few had been teachers, most weren’t.
They had run their homes, raised their children, helped in their husbands’ stores, and seemed to perform every volunteer task required to keep the schools and churches going. Pillars of the town.
Opal Calhoun, my second- grade teacher, was most often among them. When my father entered military service during World War II, my mother, my brother and I returned to Stigler. I entered Boone School for the second semester of the first grade. I wasn’t pleased. By spring I had managed to dig myself into quite a scholastic quagmire.
I was always told no teacher wanted me. Miss Calhoun, my friend Jon Conard’s aunt, said, “Give him to me.” In the course of one school year, she extracted me from the hole I had dug for myself. I went from refusing to read, to reading everything I could.
“Reading something is better than reading nothing.” Miss Calhoun planted that seed.
One day our eldest granddaughter, Emily Ann, had accompanied Billie and me to Stigler to visit my mother. Following lunch in the Stigler Cafe, I was going to introduce her to Miss Calhoun. As we approached the booth where Miss Opal was seated, a young father, who I later learned had been a student in one of Miss Opal’s adult education reading classes and now had his three daughters in tow, reached Miss Calhoun before us.
As we stepped back to wait, I heard him tell his daughters, “I want you to meet Miss Calhoun. She taught me to read and changed my life.”
I thought, “Me too.”
Among my early professional endeavors, a couple of afternoons a week, I did therapy and consulting at a residential school for girls who had gotten crossways with the courts. I hadn’t been there long when the unwillingness of the students to read came up.
The Head Mistress, expressing her frustrations, said, “I just want them to read!”
I asked, “Are you sure?”
She replied, “Yes.”
I went to the used book store and purchased a paper sack full of rather adult romance novels. Within a few months, all measures of the students’ reading scores improved. Thank you, Miss Calhoun.
If you can read there is nothing that you cannot learn. Well, except maybe calculus.
Be careful about reading health books. You could die of a misprint. – Mark Twain
