Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 14, 1995 TAG: 9506140036
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALMENA HUGHES FOOD EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Not if by retiring you mean mincing words.
``Use your head. Think about where is the logical place to look,'' she recently admonished a student who complained that he couldn't find a cooking pan.
Not retiring, as in apart or standoffish.
Grabbing the student's hand, she whisked him off to a supply closet and joined him in rummaging through a pile of pans. Leaving the closet, she stopped to wash some dishes and to tidy a sink area.
``I don't ask my students to do anything that I don't do,'' she explained.
It's true that Lawhorn is leaving the Roanoke City School system this week after 35 years of teaching. But even that could hardly be called retiring.
She plans to restore the Hollins homesite where she grew up; expand the cottage-industry drapery business that she and her husband, Jack, have operated part-time for the past 11 years; and help to revise the city schools' culinary arts curriculum.
"I just come from a very energetic family," she shrugged.
On a recent morning, Lawhorn moved purposefully about Fleming's licensed restaurant kitchen, which has been her main classroom for the past six years. It was just past 10, but already she'd coaxed an aromatic array of cakes from about 12 students, who intermittently entered and exited the area. Moving among the stainless steel counters and appliances at her usual one beat below a sprint, she dropped incidental cooking tips like batter from a spoon.
``Mash that frosting against the sides of the bowl to get the air bubbles out,'' she stopped to show and tell one student.
"Cheap stuff isn't worth buying," she said to no one in particular, pushing aside a tinny bundt pan of thrift-store quality.
In her typical way of keeping many kettles on the fire at once, Lawhorn kept an ear tuned for timers set to signal the ends of various baking cycles. She chatted with a reporter and tried to be both aware and unaware of a photographer's candid lens. She fielded staff and student questions about two fund-raising projects. She apologized for, but obviously also thrived on, the pandemonium.
``The students admit they can't keep up with me,'' she laughed. Lawhorn attributes her energy and affinity for food and teaching to genes. It took a broken hip at age 90 to slow her mother, a schoolteacher, who lived to age 98. Her father, a farmer, lived to 89.
"If I live to my mother's age, I've still got 38 to go," she observed. "That's longer than I've been teaching."
The 1954 graduate of William Byrd High School said she thinks that some of her best teaching has been with students who lacked some advantages, either economic or social, because she identifies with them.
"I think that growing up on a farm and in a working-class family has made me a better teacher because I can see what a person can do with their life if they just set a goal and go for it," she said.
"I always felt that home ec was a way to pull together so much of what students learn and help them apply it to living. Foods can be a means to an end, even if you don't want a career in it," she said.
When Lawhorn started teaching, following her graduation in 1958 from what is now James Madison University, she never dreamed that her field would be food. Her first love was sewing.
In fact, she said, food was her weakest area in college. Her first undercooked attempt at roasting a chicken - fortunately not observed by her professor - still lingers like an aftertaste on her memory.
Lawhorn's early teaching career was divided among Maryland, Roanoke and one year (1968) on an experienced-teachers' fellowship to Arizona State University. She counts that year - during which she both obtained her master's degree in home economics education and gave birth to her first daughter - among her high points.
``She even came right before Easter break, so I didn't miss but about two days of class,'' Lawhorn recalls of Jennie Lawhorn's expeditious arrival.
The births of her son, Mark Lawhorn, and baby daughter, Beth Lawhorn, also were peaks, as were being named 1974 Home Economics Teacher of the Year in Virginia; working with the now-defunct Young Homemakers of Virginia program; pulling off a highly successful catering assignment for Center In the Square during her first year teaching culinary arts; taking students on trips to a major food-industry show in Chicago; and helping her classes cater the Multiple Sclerosis Society's annual holiday dinners as one of their public-service projects.
Then there were the valleys, like a tough period during 1987 when Lawhorn had to take a half year's break from teaching and other pressures to physically and mentally rejuvenate.
"But the real low points are students who have potential and don't use it," she said, her eyes flashing angrily at the thought.
Lawhorn is known for playing students' potential to the max.
"She reminds me of my grandmother, always bragging on me," student Dalmain Grant laughed. The senior, a second chef at The Library restaurant in Roanoke, plans to begin studying in March under a scholarship to Johnson & Wales University. Ultimately, Grant said, he hopes to open his own restaurant.
Lawhorn added: "And he's going to be interviewing for an apprenticeship at the Homestead, and he's passing his job at the Library on to [fellow student] Daryl Pulling."
Junior Stacy Dillon, first-place winner in the commercial baking category of the statewide Vocational Industrial Clubs of America competition in April, said that Lawhorn has so sparked her interest in foods that she plans to become a nutritionist. And Samuel James, who with fellow sophomore Allen Anderson placed second in VICA's food-service assistant category, said he's already working at a Wendy's restaurant and plans to continue his culinary arts training next year, even though Lawhorn will be gone.
"I prepared the students for the fact that I'm leaving," she said. "Some were upset. But I told them you don't follow the person, you follow the program." Lawhorn said she feels almost as close to some of her students as to her own children.
She fondly remembers her own mentor, retired home economics supervisor Martha Akers, who offered encouragement, guidance and support when Lawhorn first started teaching foods and who remains a close friend and advisor.
Akers and several of Lawhorn's former students were among the attendees at a recent luncheon catered by the culinary arts classes. Funds from the luncheon, and from sales of an upcoming cookbook that Lawhorn described as "sort of my swan song," will help finance future field trips.
The "Colonel's Cafe Cookbook," featuring favorite recipes from Lawhorn, other instructors, students and friends of the culinary arts program, costs $10 and can be ordered by phone or fax at 981-2687.
"I'm probably going to bawl my eyes at graduation," Lawhorn predicted. "I'm excited about retiring, and yet there's a part of me that doesn't want to. I feel like it's time to go while I'm on a high, while the program is on a high and before I get burned out. But I'm a person who likes to stay busy. I'm not going to be a rocking-chair retiree."
by CNB