I see today from the Maysville Ledger-Independent that Lynda Lee McKee died Saturday. Miss McKee was of that generation of women who dedicated their formidable abilities to teaching, and I was one of the beneficiaries.
Miss McKee taught English and public speaking at Fleming County High School and directed student plays for many years, until the development of multiple sclerosis forced her to retire in 1983.
In 1965, when I was an eighth-grader registering for freshman classes, a teacher suggested that it would be good to sign up for Miss McKee’s public speaking class. I did and found myself, shy, introverted, and bookish, in a class dominated by seniors, several of them on the football team. I had to prove speedily that I could hold my own, and I made progress.
Miss McKee sponsored clubs in speech and drama and coached us for annual statewide competitions, in which I participated for four years.
She also taught the senior English class, in which she encouraged my ambitions to write.
And she cast me in plays, the lead roles in Moliere’s The Imaginary Invalid in my junior year and in Mary Chase’s Harvey in my senior year. I have stored up in my memories her compliment on Harvey: “John Early, you were better in Harvey than Jimmy Stewart, because Jimmy Stewart played Jimmy Stewart and you played Elwood Dowd.”
Had I not had her guidance and encouragement, I doubt that I would ever have developed poise to speak in public, and perhaps not the nerve to write for publication. The enduring effects of her efforts in that second-floor classroom and in the auditorium have done much to shape my life for the past four decades. And I am far, far from alone among the students whose lives she touched.
If there is a Valhalla for teachers, then today the chair reserved for Lynda Lee McKee is finally occupied.