“You’re still here!” former Redwood students, visiting the north Warren County school last week, jubilantly greeted Robbie Whitaker.

It’s difficult to think of Redwood without including Robbie. After all, she spent 50 of her 81 years working at the school, 32 as secretary and, after she retired briefly in 1988, returned on a part-time basis in the tutoring program.

Robbie’s love affair with Redwood — she said, “I went to school loving it every day’ — began when she was a child attending a small green school building there in the 1930s and ’40s. Because of the sparse population, Redwood students were then sent to Oak Ridge, but another shift brought them back to Redwood and she was in the first high school graduating class in 1945. Of the nine graduates, two, Charles Oakes and Clifton Burroughs, were in the armed forces, but the ceremony included two vacant chairs in their honor and their names were called out when diplomas were awarded.

Robbie’s most recent retirement was at the beginning of this school year, but she’s on call and just spearheaded the committee that put on a Grandparents Day dinner. There are about 425 students, she said, and her group served 260 grandparents who dined with the youngsters.

“It takes a lot of work and effort to pull that off,” she said, “but I got my crew organized. I said, ‘Lorraine, I need you.’ I can always count on Lorraine Lee” and others.

Former principal Othel Mendrop from Jett and Warren Central was among the grandparents who came, and he said, “Well, Robbie, I guess you’re going to live and die here and they’ll probably bury you on the auditorium stage.”

And Robbie replied, “Probably.”

Her employment came about in 1949 when she was working at the polls on Election Day (That’s when you were paid $3 per diem and stayed up until 3 a.m. counting ballots.) and someone said the principal, F.S. Franklin, needed a secretary and suggested that she apply.

“I said ME?” she recalled, but she could type and was pretty good at commercial work, so she went for an interview and got the job. Her only training was what she taught herself.

At the time, her daughter Linda was in the fifth grade at Redwood, and Robbie thought she would work as long as Linda was a student there. Well, Linda was in the first graduating class at Warren Central and, after college, came back to teach at her alma mater. Like her mother, she retired after 32 years — then came out of retirement and now teaches at Dana Road.

The plot thickens a bit more: Linda and her childhood sweetheart, Charles Hanks, married and he is now principal of the school he attended most of his school years.

What was it like for Robbie to work for her son-in-law, the man she had known since he was a little boy, the father of her grandchildren? She took it upon herself to keep a low profile, she said, “but he knew where I was when he needed me.” There were even times when she, for professional reasons, called her daughter “Mrs. Hanks.”

Robbie has worked for nine principals and outlasted seven of them. She’s the last person hired by the late F.S. Franklin. She was a one-person staff for years and once ran things for six weeks while the principal was out of the office, sick.

“There was no such thing as a job description, no time clock,” she said. “We worked until we got the job done, night or day.”

She said she could read her bosses backward and forward, especially J.C. Dorman who was principal for 25 years, but “the only thing I couldn’t do was read his handwriting! We got along famously — still do.”

Dorman and his wife, Dot, who also taught, live just a few miles away.

It was routine, Robbie said, that a few weeks before school started she would go from room to room taking down the window shades and repairing them with a staple gun, but “it was just part of my job.”

Other tasks were simply community service, such as poring over old school records, usually on a Sunday afternoon, and writing letters to proper officials to help someone prove his or her age when no birth certificate was on file.

Changes?

“My word! When we got an intercom system, I thought I had died and gone to heaven,” Robbie said. “Every day I was running my legs off, because teachers had to have this and had to have that. I said, ‘Oh, wheee! Look-a-here!’ Then came air conditioners.”

Now every classroom is equipped with computers, and one classroom is devoted entirely to teaching students how to use them.

There have been some unforgettable events — some sad, some happy. Robbie won’t forget the night she came home from an out-of-town ball game and found a truck backed up to a school window — a burglary was in progress. One of her fondest surprises was near the end of the school year in 1964. It was the final graduating class for Redwood before Warren Central was opened. She was in the office when she was called to the assembly in the auditorium to be told that the yearbook was dedicated to her.

Robbie remembers those lean years at Redwood, when it might be so hot — like 110 degrees — but Margaret Austin and other teachers simply took their classes outside to a shade tree and continued teaching. Discipline was not a problem then, maybe only two or three incidents a month, for the parents took care of unruly children.

Redwood has always been blessed with an active PTO, Robbie said, and they’ve worked hard to secure anything the school needed. She is justifiably proud of a quilt she made: the PTO sold tickets for it, and it brought more than $7,000.

The school has been through a lot, she said, but even along with the hard times she wouldn’t change a thing if she could. Things have slowly gotten better and better, and the school is now known for its excellence — and its test scores are among the highest.

“A principal can’t function without a good secretary, good teachers and a working PTO,” she said, and she feels that Charles Hanks has all this, that the school is in good hands, “so I can leave happy.”

Robbie has things other than school to keep her occupied, saying, “I’m too busy to get old. I’ve got things to do and places to go. I keep my suitcase half-packed.”

She works at the hospital as a Pink Lady, is active at Redwood Methodist Church, publishes a newsletter for the veterans group of which her late husband, Lester Whitaker, was a member, still works at the polls and has written a history of Redwood School.

She’ll make time for the sons — Rob who lives in Memphis and Chris, who’s in veterinary school in Missouri. There are two grandchildren and another on the way.

Robbie told of a kindergarten child who has had problems adjusting and has spent some time in the principal’s office. Last week, on Grandparents Day, the little boy went up to the principal and said, “Mr. Hanks, my grandparents can’t come today. Would you be my grandpa?”

And Hanks, taking him by the hand, assured the child he would be delighted, and the two went to eat lunch.

“With that feeling, I can leave Redwood. They’re in good shape. They’re in good hands,” Robbie said.

She’s still only about a mile and a phone call away — just in case.

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Gordon Cotton is an author and historian who lives in Vicksburg.