Artist, teacher, volunteer and inveterate learner

100-year-old hands of Wanda Roe, artist, teacher, learner
100-year-old hands of Wanda Roe, artist, teacher, learner

Learn one new thing each year!

That's the secret to a fulfilling, long life says Wanda Roe as she approaches her 100th birthday.

Roe, born Wanda Finley, recalls being given that advice during World War II when she was a young wife and mother with her husband overseas during the war.

"When I was very young and tied down with the kids, I belonged to a club, and one of the women I admire greatly told me that she had made herself learn one new thing each year. I thought, I could do that.

"So, for many years, I made sure I learned one new thing a year -- might be a skill, might be knowledge. We had a good library in that little town and I would walk to it and check out a book and study some subject."

The desire to learn and the determination to persevere in that discipline have served her well as Wanda graduated from college by 19 and was teaching school soon after most young people graduate from high school. Over the ensuing decades, she continued to learn, earning her master's degree and earning her teaching certificate in six subjects. Until the restrictions imposed because of covid-19, she was still teaching art from her studio.

The beginning

The first-born child of William Malvin Finley and Luna Cockrum Finley, Wanda was born in Grey's Hospital, Batesville, Ark., about 60 miles from the family's home in Norfork. The young couple had gone to Batesville for the birth of their first child and stayed several days in a hotel awaiting her birth. Then, returned to Norfork where Mr. Finley ran The Lyric Theatre.

Wanda said she grew up playing with the neighborhood children, most of whom were boys, climbing trees and enjoying the hills around Norfork.

She loved art and drama, was a good student and wanted to work in the fashion industry.

Growing up in Norfork, one of the oldest settlements in Arkansas, Wanda said her childhood was "serene, innocent and happy." The population of Norfork in 1920 was 224.

She helped her father in the theater and remembers being an extra, along with many other Norfork residents, in a movie, "Souls Aflame," filmed in Norfork in 1927, using many residents as extras and as minor characters in the Civil War drama.

She loved drama and majored in art and drama at college. She never expected to be a teacher and didn't believe she could be successful as an artist coming from a small town.

"There was no opportunity (to become an artist) and I didn't even get to teach art until my last few years. So, I did other things -- I became a teacher."

"My ambition was to work in fashion industry -- either drawing the clothes, or making them if someone else did the pattern. I could do either one and would have loved to," she said.

"When I went to college, majored in art and drama -- the two things I loved and was good at. I packed my days with all the classes it could get and worked weekends on sets and costumes," she said, recalling making sets out of paper mache. "I was fascinated with the lights, that was unknown to me about what light would do to anything. It would turn a costume into another color."

As for the direction of her direction of her life, "I think it's been more accidental than directed," she said, "because things I planned didn't happen, but wonderful things did happen."

Marriage and career

Wanda said her father helped her find a job after college graduation as a teacher in Viola.

One of the first questions she was asked, she said, was "Are you planning on getting married?" and she said she vehemently declared "No." The superintendent said the district lost many young female teachers when they got married.

She was to board (live with) a family in town one of whose daughters was a teacher at the school.

Millie, the teacher, took Wanda to see the school and she clearly remembers walking in a room seeing a "guy with black curly hair wearing white coveralls" sitting on the floor hammering on a bookcase. "He stood up, all 6 feet 4 inches, the handsomest man I ever saw."

That man was Roy Roe, the principal and coach at the school. They began dating in September and married on Christmas day.

"I married the handsome coach who was the love and light of my life," Wanda wrote.

Over almost a century, Wanda has seen opportunities change dramatically for women.

"When my mother was a girl, the careers open to her were secretary, nurse and maybe a teacher. Some schools wouldn't hire women who were married and if they had a baby, they made them stay out for a year,"

Technology and the viewpoint of what a woman can do have changed, she said.

•••

Editor's note: This is the first in a two-part article about Wanda Roe, teacher and artist, and her 100th year. The conclusion will be published Oct. 28, 2020.

Wanda Roe, 99, of Pea Ridge
Wanda Roe, 99, of Pea Ridge
Wanda Roe, 99, of Pea Ridge
Wanda Roe, 99, of Pea Ridge
Wanda Roe
Wanda Roe
Wanda Roe
Wanda Roe

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11 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 7, 2020

Caravan to celebrate

100th birthday of

Wanda Roe

Pea Ridge Heritage Building

downtown Pea Ridge

east of North Curtis Avenue

north of Pickens Road

Enter Intermediate School campus from the west

*Please stay in vehicles and observe social distancing!