ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, June 2, 1996 TAG: 9606030013
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-19 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: FLOYD
SOURCE: TRACY WHITAKER STAFF WRITER
Suddenly, Hugh Vest didn't mind taking his younger brothers and sisters to school every day.
"I figured that Hugh had a crush on me," Dorothy "Dot" Vest recalls with a laugh, "but I was just 18 and he was three years younger. I guess I was too busy teaching to think about having a boyfriend."
In the fall of 1934, Dot West (her maiden name) was the new teacher at Double Springs School in rural Floyd County, one of the county's many one-room schoolhouses. She had 20 pupils in grades one through seven. After graduating from Floyd County High School in the spring of 1932, she had attended Radford State Teacher's College for a year and earned her teaching certificate.
"I had my heart set on becoming a nurse when I graduated from high school, but my father wouldn't have it," she says. "I was a little bit headstrong."
She had mailed her application to nursing school in Richmond, but her father slipped out to the mailbox and removed it. He wanted her to be a teacher.
"After a good bit of talking, we decided that I would go to Radford State Teacher's College and earn my teaching certificate," Vest says. Her father said he would loan her the money for tuition. "I made a promise to myself to pay back every cent."
After getting her certificate, her first job was teaching young pupils at Double Springs for two years.
In the fall of 1936, she was assigned to teach at another of Floyd County's one-room schools, at Camp Creek. West found that a certain teen-age boy had not forgotten her - in fact, he followed her to her next teaching assignment.
"Well, it seemed that Hugh had missed me over the summer, so he made his way out to visit me at the new school," she says.
"I finally had to own up to wanting to court her," says Hugh Vest, smiling. "My brothers and sisters had finished school, so I'd run out of excuses to get to see her."
Dot was 21 and Hugh was 18 when they began dating.
"My father wasn't about to let me date," she says. "He even ran Hugh off one time. It took a little while for him to see things our way, but finally he did."
A year later, Hugh proposed.
"I held steady and told Hugh that we would have to wait another year to be married. I wanted to pay the loan in full. Would you believe that before the week was out, Hugh had made arrangements to pay off the debt?''
"Well, on a Sunday in May a week or two after we had made up to go ahead and get married, we went fishing," she says. "We had a little falling out, though. Hugh accidentally sat on my glasses and broke them. But before the day was over, we were back in good spirits. We had a plan."
Dot needed her glasses to teach, so a trip to Roanoke would be necessary to have repairs done.
The morning they were to elope, Dot woke up, dressed and ran to the schoolhouse and pinned a note on the door: "No School Today! Glasses broke. Gone to Roanoke to get them fixed."
"My dad wanted me to stay home and plant corn that day," Hugh Vest says. "I managed to talk him into letting me make the trip to Roanoke, agreeing to run an errand for him while I was there."
The couple got their license and were married in Roanoke on May 3, 1937. The new bride was back in her classroom the next day, glasses as good as new and a wedding band on her left hand.
When school began in the fall of 1937, Dot Vest was again reassigned, this time to Pleasant View School. She taught for several more years in Floyd County, then stopped to begin their family. When her children were in school, Vest went back to college at Radford to earn a bachelor's degree. She returned to the classroom and taught a total of 31 years in Floyd County.
Dot, 81, and Hugh, 78, have three children, six grandchildren, a great-grandson and a one-eyed dog named Biscuit. They have lived on Big Hill Farm in Floyd County for nearly six decades.
LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: GENE DALTON/Staff. Dot Vest remembers the time Hugh cameby CNBcourting.