Her encyclopedias are wellworn, for they’ve been used a lot. That’s because Mary Helen Sims has an inquisitive mind, a lot of curiosity, “and I don’t have a computer. I have more fun looking things up.”

Her interests are many and varied — art, genealogy, history, travel, the Bible — just about anything found on the printed page or things waiting to be discovered. She’s an artist, a researcher, a writer, a historian and a genealogist.

For 61 of her 86 years, Mary Helen has lived in Vicksburg, a place she said she wouldn’t move to, “but I came because my husband got a job here.” He worked for O’Neill-McNamara and was also a sales rep for Smith and Wesson.

Mary Helen grew up in Gallman, a village in Copiah County where her mother was the mayor and her father the marshal. She remembers them as kind, gentle people who never uttered profane words — “not even darn” — and her father once captured a crook by hitting him on the head with the butt of his gun rather than shooting him.

She went to school in Gallman and would have been valedictorian of her graduating class, “But this girl moved to town — and she beat me” — probably one of the few times in her life when she has settled for second best.

When she was 11, she had an attack of appendicitis and was too sick to be moved. A doctor came from Jackson and performed the appendectomy with Mary Helen stretched out on the dining room table.

In college at Co-Lin in Wesson in 1941, she had “the most fun — for a month.” She was taking French and loving it when the school put her in a chemistry class because her mother insisted she major in home economics, “which I hated. In chemistry, about all I learned was that acid will eat holes in your clothes. I barely passed.”

Other memories were more pleasant, like when she played the piano in the dorm lobby for the other students to do the jitterbug. She tried her hand at ghost writing, penning all of her roommate’s love letters to a boy who was in the service.

After two years of college, she was certified to teach because “they needed teachers badly.” Her first job was at Hopewell, near Georgetown, where she taught eighth grade. She and another teacher boarded in an old, old house with no plumbing. They walked to school on a gravel road and, “since I was a teacher, I was being Miss Priss, you know, and I tore up all my high-heeled shoes on that gravel.”

The next year, she applied at Eatonville, near Hattiesburg, with her pay at $100 a month — $10 more than they first offered. She taught a variety of subjects from the seventh through the 12th grades. Between her apartment and the school was a little store “where I spent most of my money because every time I went by there I bought a candy bar or something.”

It was at Eatonville that she met the man she would marry, Thaddeus L. Sims. He was working at the PX at Camp Shelby after a surgery in the Air Force left him nearly paralyzed. He lived way past the school, but he and Mary Helen met at church in Sunday school class where he sat on one end of a long pew and she on the other.

“I flirted with him, but I couldn’t get him to look at me,” she said. The ice melted because both loved to read and began swapping books, then came the movies and picnics. That summer she went back to Gallman, though they wrote every day.

“Can you believe this? I got a job typing deeds for an abstract company,” she said, though she had taken only one semester of typing, “and I wasn’t allowed one mistake or a strikeover. So I had a trash basket full of paper by the end of the day.”

Mary Helen and Thaddeus were married in 1945. He had wanted to live in Arizona, but on a trip there he had a heat stroke. So it was back to Gallman, where they were living when he got the job here. They had a 2-year-old daughter, Linda Bess, and later a son, Andy.

Though she had always liked to draw, Mary Helen didn’t do any art until she got to Vicksburg. She joined with others attending workshop classes in art at the Teen Center.

“I didn’t know much about it,” she said, “but we drew, painted and all that sort of stuff,” and it “just kind of grew into the Vicksburg Art Association.” She is a charter member of the organization and was one of its early presidents.

She “always drew,” but had “no instruction, no encouragement growing up in a gray, drab world,” but really loved color. She had still rather draw than paint, and she prefers pastels, oils and watercolors to acrylics because the latter “dry too fast, and I’m not a chemist.” She enjoys mixing colors.

Mary Helen didn’t have the opportunity to take art courses until her daughter was a senior in high school, and Thaddeus offered to put his wife through college. She enrolled at Mississippi College, taking classes under Dr. Sam Gore and graduating with distinction with a bachelor’s degree.

She didn’t wait to have the diploma in hand when she began looking for a job — and was the only graduating senior who secured employment before school was out. Public high schools in Warren County didn’t offer art classes, so she approached the superintendent of Vicksburg Schools about the subject. He wasn’t interested, so she made the proposal to Sharp Banks, superintendent of the county schools, and he said, “We’ll try it.” She taught one art class with 16 students and four seventh-grade English classes. The next year she had two art classes, and soon it was a full curriculum with an additional teacher, Sandra Nicola.

“I didn’t quit, I didn’t retire,” Mary Helen said. “I was just burned out,” so she left the school in 1973. She had established the first public high school art program in this area, and it was soon recognized as one of the best in the state.

Her art is in more private collections than she can count, and it is in several public buildings in Vicksburg. The large-as-life paintings of Gens. Pemberton and Grant she painted are in the lobby of the Battlefield Inn, and at the Old Court House Museum are her paintings of Sarah Knox Taylor, Varina Davis, Ben Montgomery and his wife, Capt. T.P. Leathers and Indian Chiefs Pushmataha and Greenwood Leflore. Two of her bronze sculptures, of Jefferson and Varina Davis, are in the memorial garden on the Old Court House lawn.

She has applied her love of history to several different outlets. She’s written two family histories and also penned the history of Gallman, though she doesn’t know “how in the world I found time to do all that stuff.” She traced the route her great-grandfather, Jeff Sanders, took from Corinth to Antietam when he was in the 17th Mississippi as a Confederate soldier. He was wounded, captured and refused to let a Yankee doctor amputate his leg because he didn’t trust him.

Maybe that’s where Mary Helen gets her determination — for once she studies a subject or situation and comes to a conclusion, there’s no changing her mind. A point in case is when she took over as president of the Vicksburg and Warren County Historical Society, the organization that runs the Old Court House Museum. That was in 1976. She had been in office a month. Did she remember?

“Man, do I remember!”’ she said. What would ordinarily have been a routine “pound the gavel” monthly meeting became the second battle of Vicksburg when county supervisors clandestinely offered to give the Old Court House to the State Parks Commission. When the deal came to light, battle lines were drawn. Various offers were made and deals suggested, but Mary Helen didn’t bargain, she didn’t compromise.

Things came to a head when representatives of the Parks Commission, historical society and board of supervisors met in the museum’s library. Mary Helen was seated at the head of the big table, facing a sea of men. Uninvited guests came from the Chamber of Commerce, and the room was full.

Mary Helen was never rude nor ugly, but she calmly explained that she would not bargain. She simply “let ’em have it” in plain language. She was determined there would be no takeover and let them know she wouldn’t be pushed around. “They noticed that I meant business,” she recalled, “and they backed down.”

She’s always loved to travel and has made numerous trips around the country and to Europe. In Ireland, she said, “Everybody told me I didn’t need to kiss the Blarney stone.”

After teaching, she worked in a bookstore and in several antique shops and said she won’t feel old “until I can’t get around.” Thaddeus died several years ago, and Linda Bess a few months ago, and now, she said, “The whole world has changed.”

She’s put art on hold for a while.

She’s a member of First Baptist Church, where she has always taught Sunday school and is now co-teaching with Caroline Mendrop. She loves teaching. Many will agree there is plenty of evidence to prove she has been a good one.

And how has it been living in Vicksburg, the place she didn’t want to live?

She’s found it kind of cosmopolitan, an interesting place with people from everywhere. She’s enjoyed teaching, enjoyed church work and friends…

“… and I’m still here.”

She’s certainly left her mark.

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