Graduates fondly remembered by adopted grandma

PEA RIDGE — Pea Ridge High School graduating senior Jason McMahon once had to share his grandmother, Marilyn Briggs, with 20 other children.

Ten years ago, McMahon was in Ms. Laura Eldrod’s second grade class. Briggs visited Pea Ridge from her home state of Arizona, and found a “much too comfortable rocking chair” at Pea Ridge Elementary School.

“We chatted about the old days and getting to the present day,as far as their little minds went,” Briggs said of her first visit to the classroom, where she read the children stories and told them about where she lived.

Every month after that for the rest of the school year, the class and their “Grandmother” Briggs would exchange packets of letters, information and books.

Briggs would send the class items native to Arizona, trying to stick to the theme of what the class was studying. The second graders in return sent her letters and cards and drawings of things like cacti and images from their livesas little people just getting to know the world.

The students from that second grade class graduated high school Saturday. Their letters and drawings remain cherished in Briggs’ possession in a manilla envelope.

“Thank you for tucking us under your wing,” Elrod told Briggs in a letter when that school year was over.

Briggs and Elrod still keep in touch. Elrod and her husband, Gene, are retired and make their home in Lufkin, Texas.

Briggs is originally from Minnesota and lived in Arizona for 20 years, where she was a third-grade teacher.

She now resides in Bentonville. She and her late husband have five children, but really six she says, including a foreign exchange student from Turkey that “melted into being one of the kids.”

Briggs’ son Joe McMahon and wife, Ellen, live in PeaRidge with their children Patrick, a sophomore at Williams Baptist College in Walnut Ridge, Jason, a senior at Pea Ridge High School, and Jessica, a thirdgrader at Pea Ridge Primary School.

“When I was here, I would go as often as I could (to the classroom), but we wrote all year. We played chalkboard games, therewas an arithmetic game we would play on the board,” Briggs said.

Briggs kept a list of students written by Elrod, first name only. They were James, Jessica, Rachel, Kenny, Krista, Ariel, Alex, Kattie, Bobbylee, Victoria, Melanie, Jason, Heather, Nathan, Dustin, Aaron, Courtney, Rosalio, Tyler, Hayley and Brooke.