Anyone who attended Polk County High School between 1926 and 1949 should remember Miss Lerah Emerson, who taught English and worked as the academic records keeper during those years. She was an attractive, petite, well-dressed lady, whose most outstanding characteristic which I recall was her walk, best described using Shakespeare's "trippingly." Moving quickly and lightly, nimbly perched on her toes, despite the high heels she always wore, she never allowed her heels to make a sound on the floor.

I knew her casually all of my growing-up years but did not learn to appreciate her until I was in her Junior English class, American literature. It was a small class which met first period on the western side, the senior section of the study hall which stretched across the second floor of Old Sara Desota. She was a collateral descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the prominent 19th-century New England poet-philosopher, her grandfather having left that part of the country and settled in Alabama after the Civil War. Though she was very much a Southerner, she obviously relished her New England literary background, for she taught me much about the Transcendentalists, and when we read Emerson's "Concord Hymn," she instilled in my mind the unique New England pronunciation of "Concord," which sounds like "conquered." (Four years later I made a powerful impression on a UTK English professor with this bit a knowledge.) I also learned from her the expression, "Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," which, although it came from the pen of R. W. Emerson, we both questioned its being a universal truth.

Sadly, I would have to cast Miss Emerson in that category which I have previously described as gypsy teachers. While she was a happy fixture at Polk County High School for most of her teaching career, she never had a real home. She spent the summers with her much older sister and brother-in-law, the Patillos, at their small apartment in Atlanta. When in Benton, she lived in rented rooms, boarding quite comfortably in some of the town's best homes, but she never had any possession of her own. She traveled by bus with her suitcases.

Early in her time in Polk County, the area's first dentist, Buford Goodner, had engaged in a serious courtship with Miss Emerson which failed--according to my Grandmother Kimbrough who had grown up on a Bradley County farm backing onto the Goodner place--because of the hold Buford's older sisters had on him. For some reason I once mentioned Buford Goodner to her. She surprised me by saying, "Mr. Brewer used to say to me, "Lerah, you could be the making of that man!"' But she didn't expand on that.

After A. J. "Pop" Anderson became a widower, he turned his attention to Miss Emerson. He had come to PCHS as a teacher in 1925, in time becoming the County Superintendent of Education for several years. I think almost everyone--except Miss Emerson--hoped that she would marry him and settle down with a home in Benton. Eventually he married a retired teacher from his hometown in Arkansas.

Miss Emerson became a much closer friend of my Aunt Blanche after my Grandmother McClary's death in 1948. At some point she met Aunt Blanche's cousin Clara Tye Finchum and her husband who was Superintendent of City Schools in Clinton, TN. Miss Emerson left PCHS in the Spring of 1949, returning to Tennessee in the Fall to teach at Clinton High School

I saw her two or three times in Clinton where she seemed to be reasonably happy barding in the home of a fireman, but abruptly she retired and moved to Atlanta to live with her sister Patsy Patillo, whose husband had died a few years earlier. The next I knew about her was when Mrs. Pitallo came to Benton to deal with Miss Emerson's will, which had been made in Polk County many years before and never changed. She stopped by to see Aunt Blanche briefly and told a science-fiction sounding story about Miss Emerson's illness and death, apparently from exposure to radioactivity. Men from Washington had appeared at the hospital just before her death and taken full control of the situation, ordering an unopened coffin to be buried in a lead vault , leaving Mrs. Patillo more than a little confused and bewildered. Mrs. Patillo had signed many papers which she didn't really understand, and men from Washington had taken care of all expenses relating to Miss Emerson's hospitalization and burial. "They" supposed she had somehow been contaminated from Oak Ridge contacts?

I never heard anything else about Miss Emerson. I am always saddened to think that such a fine person could have had such a vagabond life and such an ignoble departure from this life. Miss Emerson certainly deserved better.