Ms. Prentice stood in the doorway of the auditorium with the clipboard hanging from one hand and her mouth slightly open. Above the double doors, in tall brass letters that had been polished so often the paint had worn off the edges, the words were written, as they had been since 1996. She read them aloud, softly, to the hallway. “The Viola Haskins Auditorium. In honor of forty years of teaching at Topeka West High School.” I am Viola Haskins, eighty four years old, and I stood in the corridor in my navy suit and my sensible shoes, with the little golden apple pinned to my lapel, and I felt a hundred pairs of eyes on the back of my neck.
In 1962, I started teaching English at Topeka West in a room with no heat and a chalkboard cracked down the middle. I taught for forty years. I taught four thousand students to write a topic sentence, and I directed thirty eight school plays on that stage, in the very auditorium that now carries my name, without a budget. The golden apple was the district forty year teaching pin. I wear it to every reunion, every Open House, every graduation, because I have never been able to stay away from a school.
The old janitor, Mr. Odell Sims, who had been mopping the end of the corridor with his bucket, let the mop fall against the wall. “Mrs. Haskins,” he said, with tears already starting, “you cast me as Falstaff in nineteen eighty seven. I have never forgotten it.” The students lined along the lockers had stopped talking. A girl in a drama club sweatshirt clapped a hand over her mouth. A teacher at the far end of the hall came walking toward us, slowly, as if in a dream, and said, “That is her. That is the Viola Haskins.”
A small golden apple on a navy lapel gave one retired English teacher a single hallway to bring a young teacher back to her own auditorium in Topeka.
I gave my terms with the same calm voice I had once used to quiet thirty sophomores. “Ms. Prentice, I am not going to speak to the principal. You are twenty seven years old, and this is your first year, and a hallway full of eager children can unnerve anyone. But I would like three things. I would like you to read the dedication plate aloud to every freshman class. I would like you to unlock the stage for me for one hour this afternoon. And I would like you to find the key to the old prop room, because I left my copy of Our Town in there in two thousand and two.”
Ms. Prentice came forward and her eyes were full. “Mrs. Haskins, I am so sorry,” she said. “I teach in your auditorium. I run the spring play on the stage you built.” She pressed her hand to her forehead. “I told you that visitors could not stand in the hallway without a pass. I told you that the auditorium was closed for rehearsal. I said it with that tone, you know the one, the tone we promise ourselves we will never use.” Her shoulders shook. “You taught my own mother here. She told me about you all through my childhood.”
Then, in her confusion, she did the one thing she should not. Ms. Prentice reached out, unclipped the golden apple from my lapel, and walked rapidly down the hall toward the front office, saying she would check it with the district records. She had gone as far as the trophy case when Mr. Sims moved into the middle of the corridor and spread his arms with the mop in one hand. The girl in the drama sweatshirt ran around and blocked the other side, and the teacher at the end of the hall stepped across, and the students along the lockers closed in.
Ms. Prentice stopped in front of the trophy case, with the apple held in her fingers and a ring of students around her. Nobody spoke. Then Mr. Sims, who had been the quietest man in the building for thirty years, said in a low voice, “Madam, that is hers. She earned it. Forty years.” Ms. Prentice turned. The corridor was silent. She walked back to me, her eyes streaming, and fastened the golden apple on my lapel as carefully as if it were glass, and then, very simply, she hugged me.
The consequences were lovely. That afternoon, the entire drama club filed into the auditorium to sit on the stage floor around my folding chair while I read the first act of Our Town aloud, with Mr. Sims as the Stage Manager. The principal had the dedication plate polished and added a line beneath it. Ms. Prentice began a monthly Alumni Teachers Day, and invited five retired teachers to speak. She gave me her spare key to the stage door, and told me that I had better use it.
In the name of my husband Clarence, who passed in 2012, I started the Clarence Haskins Fund. It pays for scholarships for future teachers and for supplies in classrooms that have none, in Shawnee, Douglas and Jefferson counties. In the first year we sent twenty six students into teaching programs and filled three hundred classroom supply bins. One was a young man from Oskaloosa who wanted to teach shop class, and who sent me a photograph of his first birdhouse, nailed together by thirty children.
In May, I sat in the front row of the Viola Haskins Auditorium, in my navy suit and my golden apple, and watched the spring play. The curtain rose. On the stage, in the warm glow of the lights, a girl in a plain gray dress stood at the center and began the opening speech, and behind her, in the wings, Ms. Prentice mouthed the words with her. After the final line, the whole house rose. Ms. Prentice walked to the front of the stage, looked down, and pointed to me. And the auditorium that bore my name said thank you.