About This Girl I Knew

I was older but she was wiser.  Georgann tried to keep it a secret from me that she was smarter than I was and she made all her friends promise not to tell me.  Of course, I had figured that out 15 minutes after we first met.

As the cutest girl in Crow High School, she was a pom pom twirler who, after graduation, was recruited, along with three other girls from northern states, by an all Black college in Mississippi who needed white girls to dot the "i"s in their band's cursive spell-out maneuver.  I'm pretty sure that's true. Too far from home, she decided, and instead chose Southern Oregon College in Ashland for her continuing education.

There were distractions (fermented hops, the Applegate River) but she left SOC with an Mrs degree and pursued a banking career with First National Bank, soon to become Wells Fargo.  Fast-forward 10 years or so and Georgann has removed McNeal as her last name and replaced it with Landers.  She has immersed her daughter, Kathleen, in Catholicism at All Saints Elementary and Central Catholic High School and now points her toward Eugene and the University of Oregon.

Then a life-changing course explosion: The mature mother of one resolves to go back to finish that original quest for knowledge and she does exactly that.  She took to the rhythms of college classes like an alcoholic finding a key to the keg cellar.  Straight "A" all the way in Economics.  And then that walk across the stage in cap and gown to claim her Honors degree with a smile that lit the arena.

She retired as a Vice President of Wells Fargo Bank.