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Century of memories

Decatur resident celebrates 100 years with an educational wreath

WREATH TIME – Imogene Eckey stands next to her new wreath. Messenger photo by Christian McPhate

Imogene Eckey has spent the past 100 years, watching change happen at a more rapid rate the older she gets. She was born at the end of the Border War with Mexico in 1919 about a year after World War I ended and has lived through most of the United States’ major accomplishments, including the Civil Rights Movement, the man on the moon and the rise of the computer age.

Eckey doesn’t think she’s lived an exciting life, but it has been a stable one, following what she calls the “right road” and one that she preferred when it was wider.

A retired Bridgeport elementary school teacher, Eckey received an educational wreath last week in honor of the first day of school. It’s the reason that the Messenger weathered a rainy Wednesday morning to chat with her about her 100 years spent in and out of Wise County.

“Stay active,” said Eckey, referring to her secret of longevity. “Just keep moving.”

EAST TEXAS DAYS
Time has a way of merging memories together. Dates begin to lose meaning after a 100 years walking the earth. Eckey hasn’t pondered many of those memories in a long time, and the Messenger has done its best to map out a timeline of her life. It was kind of like searching for Waldo in a Dr. Seuss book.

Eckey was born in 1919 and grew up in East Texas on her daddy’s sharecropping farm during the heyday of Bonnie and Clyde. She calls the town of Athens home. It’s a small community with a population of roughly 12,700 people. Some of the more notable people from the community includes Clint W. Murchison, Jr., a businessman and founder of the Dallas Cowboys, and William Wayne Justice, a former U.S. District Judge who eliminated the Texas Department of Justice’s building tender system and established sweeping reforms to the Texas prison system.

For those unfamiliar with building tenders, they were a group of trustie inmates who acted as guards and kept control in Texas prisons. Justice wasn’t a fan of the system because the building tenders were basically like mafia bosses controlling the cell blocks. “The incarceration is punishment, the rest is punishment above what is authorized by law,” he wrote in his 188-page decision from the early 1980s.

A graduate of a business school in Tyler, Eckey didn’t work for justice, but she did spend time at the district clerk’s office in Henderson County. Shortly after she began working there, District Clerk Pat Beard was indicted on six counts of misapplication and embezzlement of money left in trust funds, according to a Sept. 27, 1939, article by the Longview News-Journal.

After Beard was ousted, Eckey was appointed to finish out Beard’s second term.

“Later on, several years later, I was in San Antonio and guess who I saw standing at the capital?” Eckey asked. “Pat Beard. He was selling newspapers on the courthouse steps. I had a good job, but to see that poor guy who I once worked for standing there, it was a sad day.”

THE WISE COUNTY YEARS

Eckey had known her first husband Zeb Tindel from the Athens area. An Iowa native, he was a veteran who had served as a gunner in the Air Force in World War II. She doesn’t recall what he was like now, other than that he was hard of hearing due to time spent in war planes.

When the Messenger asked how they met and started dating, Eckley said, “Probably at a beer joint in Fort Worth. I was a wild child back then.”

Whatever led to their love sparking, they stayed together until his death several years ago.

Eckey’s husband is the reason she ended up in Bridgeport. After he retired from the military, he hitchhiked from Athens to Bridgeport for a job as an agriculture teacher. He was competing against 67 people but landed the job and moved his wife and only child, Beverly, there not long after his daughter’s birth in the early 1960s.

“I had no idea where Bridgeport was,” Eckey said.

Not long after her husband started working as the agriculture teacher, the Bridgeport superintendent asked Eckey if she had ever considered becoming a teacher. He told her that the school district had several teaching positions to fill.

“I was told to get the degree and you will have a job,” she recalled.

Eckey enrolled at Decatur Baptist College the last semester it was opened and then headed over to North Texas State University to finish her teaching degree.

After she graduated, Eckey was told that she would be teaching third graders at the elementary school.

“I liked it so well I stayed in it for 21 or 26 years,” she said. “All in Bridgeport, one grade and one school.”

LIFE IN ASSISTED LIVING

Nowadays, Eckey resides at Governor’s Ridge in Decatur, a few doors down from her daughter Beverly. Her apartment is a one-bedroom place and much smaller than the two-story house that she built with her second husband, Ron Eckey, after they retired. She keeps the flag that the military had given her after her husband’s death on top of a shelf in the small kitchen area. She said she feels like she has kind of wasted time the last few years because all she seems to do is sit since she sold her house in Runaway Bay and moved into the assisted-living center.

When she retired from teaching, Eckey spent some time as a substitute, which she called harder work than being a third grade teacher. But she mostly “sits on her butt.”

She doesn’t hear from her former students and guesses that it was because she was too rough on them.

But she did hear from Joy Woodruff who brought her an education wreath in honor of Eckey’s time as teacher. It’s a massive wreath, filled with red polkadot, yellow and blue ribbons. It is far bigger than one Mrs. Claus would make toward the end of the year and kind of resembles something you’d see on the Fourth of July.

Wreath making started as a hobby for Woodruff and her friend, who wishes to remain anonymous, but has now turned into something special.

“We can only keep so many ourselves,” Woodruff said.

Eckey never planned to live 100 years. As she got older, she just started taking it day to day. She once asked God if she were going to be here tomorrow. “He said, ‘Yes, if you live right,'” she recalled. “And so I do my best to live like a good person should.”

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