Half a century cannot keep Jackie Shelton from knowing all about some of the students she has taught — not when they’ve grown to lead such memorable lives.

There’s the Whittier boys who grew up to be a doctor, a grocer and an insurance agent, the Fort Gibson girl who now teaches college, the kid at Hilldale who now cleans her carpet and represents her town in the Legislature.

Keeping up is important to the veteran teacher, now 76. She not only keeps up with former students, but also several teachers with whom she has worked.

“We retired teachers meet once a month at different places — we even had a meeting yesterday,” she said last week from her sunlit living room in southeast Muskogee.

Shelton looks back on a teaching career that includes one year in the old two-story Whittier Elementary School, one year at Grant Foreman Elementary when it was the newest school in town, then 23 years at the ever-growing Hilldale Elementary.

She even married an educator, David Shelton, who taught and coached for 11 years at Alice Robertson Middle School.

“I met David in college at Northeastern,” she said, recalling her years at Northeastern State University. “He played football at the University of Oklahoma under Bud Wilkinson.

“He planned on teaching school, so he finished his two degrees at Northeastern.”

Teaching came as

a surprise occupation

Even though Jackie Shelton looks back on a distinguished education career, she does not recall growing up wanting to teach.

“When I was in high school, I took an aptitude test and the and the teacher said to me, ‘Jackie, it looks like you need to be a teacher, and I kind of laughed, because I didn’t know what he had in mind.”

After graduating from Okmulgee High School in 1951, the Henryetta native attended Oklahoma State University’s Okmulgee branch “to get some preliminaries out of the way.”