"Good morning, boys and girls"

"Good morning, Mrs. Ford!"

"How's the third grade?"

"Fiiinnne.... how are YOU, Mrs. Ford?"

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My classmates and I would take part in this sing-song exchange on a weekly basis with Mrs. Eleanor Ford when she'd walk through the door of a classroom, with adjustments made to phrasing through the years as we moved from grade to grade. 
 

She was the librarian at Maplecrest Elementary School in Lebanon, Missouri where I attended Kindergarten through 5th grade between 1978-1984, as well as the librarian at Hillcrest Elementary School where I attended 6th grade during the 1984/1985 school year. This was also the last year she taught prior to her retirement.

I - like so many other children in the Lebanon school system - loved and respected her.

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In the years since I'd see something that would make me think of Mrs. Ford... like the first time I drove past Maplecrest after her library had been remodeled and expanded. Or walking through the section of children's books in a bookstore in Nashville, Tennessee during my college years and stopping to find a copy of The Boxcar Children, a book that she introduced to me and countless other children. I then bought a copy and proudly added it to my own growing collection of books.
 

In recent years, other former students of Mrs. Ford's would occasionally make a post about her on Facebook that would solicit several loving memories and anecdotes. 

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After one such recent post I did a simple search on the internet to look for additional information or photos of Mrs. Ford. I was disheartened - about all I could find was a photo of her and her husband's headstone in the Lebanon City Cemetery on findagrave.com. 

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I was in disbelief - how could a woman that had had such an impact on what I knew had to be generations of children in the Lebanon, Missouri school system not have more written about her, not have received any more recognition online than that?

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​This website was created to help rectify that situation and to archive people's memories of Mrs. Ford. People can also share memories on the Facebook page The Mrs. Ford Project.

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Mrs. Ford was the librarian for each of Lebanon's four elementary schools (Donnelly, Hillcrest, Maplecrest, Mark Twain (now Boswell)) from the 1958/1959 school year until 1974. It was then that another librarian was hired to manage Donnelly and Mark Twain's libraries, while Mrs. Ford continued to manage those at Hillcrest and Maplecrest until she retired in May 1985.  

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With that information in mind, I did some rough math and determined that approximately 3,300 Lebanon elementary school students had her as their school librarian over the years. She would have taught about 450 children had she been the teacher of a single classroom during those same years. 

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But she was so much more than a librarian to many of us, and we continue to learn from and be influenced by all that she taught us.

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- Kris Addison-Bullard, Lebanon High School Class of 1991
  June 2020

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