Sharice Eubanks Page

BUSH: [00:05] All right. Greetings to you, Sharice Eubanks Page.

PAGE: Same to you. 

BUSH: Thank you, thank you. Today is October 27, 2018. My name is Douglas Bush. I’m a volunteer with the B.F. Yancey Heritage and History Project. And we’re so delighted to have you here. We appreciate you coming to share your memories and thoughts about your time at Yancey, about your perspectives on the history of this community, on way back, as early as you remember with Yancey and your whole perspective on education.

PAGE: Okay.

BUSH: [00:56] Particularly your community. So tell me some about that. What are your earliest memories of Yancey? When did you begin here?

PAGE: I began here at Yancey in 1975, in kindergarten.

BUSH: Kindergarten, okay.

PAGE: Yeah, I do not remember my teacher’s name. (mic noise) But, yeah. That was my most earliest memory here, was being in kindergarten. And naptime was the best time. (laughter) 

BUSH: Still is, isn’t it?

PAGE: Still is today, exactly. But Yancey was fun. It was a great foundation. It laid the foundation for me to go to college, and to pursue my likes, and what I found out I didn’t like to do. 

BUSH: [01:42] Kindergarten through fifth grade?

PAGE: Fifth grade, yeah. Fannie Louden was my fifth-grade teacher. 

BUSH: How about that?

PAGE: Yeah. And one of the activities we did have during the time I was here was a jazz dance with Sandy Reed. Who, she’s retired in living in Charlottesville now, but she had a jazz dance troupe, and we would always do jazz dances for our parents and the community and stuff. Another memory was the fall festival we had, where there would be booths set up in the cafeteria where you could play games and win prizes and things like that. 

BUSH: [02:19] Fall festival?

PAGE: Fall festival. 

BUSH: Jazz dance, fall festival.

PAGE: Mm-hm. 

BUSH: [02:23] Other big events that you think of, that you loved about Yancey?

PAGE: What was it—field day. We did field day. And I’m telling all the fun things we did—not the educational things we did, it seems. (laughs) 

BUSH: [02:38] What was field day like? 

PAGE: Field day was when all of us would go out, and we’d divide up in teams, and it was just a big competition. It was like the Olympics for us. So you got to play—Like you’d run the 50-yard dash, you had the tug-o-war against the fifth grade and the fourth grade, things like that. Yeah, it was fun. 

BUSH: [03:03] How was it to be right in this community, and to be so close to school like this? You grew up right on this road, didn’t you?

PAGE: Yeah, I grew up on 627 Porter’s Road. It was just nice having the school in the community. It gave you a sense of home. And everybody was your parent at that point. There was nothing that a parent could say to you that that wasn’t true. They had the ability to correct you—and not be worried about being reprimanded by your parents or having the police called or anything. (laughs) You were policed by the community.

BUSH: [03:42] Right, right. And that carried over to school, too?

PAGE: Oh, yeah, carried over into school. 

BUSH: [03:46] The teachers, they knew your parents?

PAGE: Oh, yes. My mom played a big part of me being in school, and being visible and there. 

BUSH: [03:57] What is your mom’s name?

PAGE: My mom’s name is Connie Coltrane Eubanks. 

BUSH: [04:02] Did she volunteer, or was she just a presence here?

PAGE: She was just a presence. She volunteered sometimes when her job allowed time for her to be here, but she was just a presence.  

BUSH: She knew the teachers, then.

PAGE: She knew the teachers. Some of the teachers, they’re friends now. 

BUSH: [04:20] Do you remember who the principal was when you were here?

PAGE: I had two, maybe three different principals. There was Miss Phillips. And then there was Gerald Terrell, as a principal also. I think there was a third one, but I’m not—I can’t remember.

BUSH: [04:37] What were they like?

PAGE: Mr. Terrell: very rigid. (laughs) Very rigid. He liked things a certain way. Miss Phillips was the motherly, nurturing type.

BUSH: Nice to have that.

PAGE: Oh, yeah. 

BUSH: [04:57] So did you have one teacher for each class all the way through?

PAGE: Mm-hm.

BUSH: Yeah, my elementary school was that way, too. Yeah, you had a second-grade teacher, she was your teacher all day.

PAGE: All day.

BUSH: Oh he, or whoever.

PAGE: Mm-hm. 

BUSH: [05:10] Did you have men and women teachers?

PAGE: I’m trying to, I did not have a—My first man teacher was at Walton, when I went to Walton. But I had women teachers all through my elementary years.

BUSH: [05:24] So you never rode a school bus until you went to Walton? 

PAGE: No, I rode a school bus. My grandmother was my school-bus driver.

BUSH: [05:30] For Yancey?

PAGE: For Yancey. 

BUSH: Oh, you actually rode the bus down here.

PAGE: Mm-hm. Yeah, yeah.

BUSH: So that’s just—

PAGE: Down the street. (laughs) 

BUSH: Down the street but you got on the bus.

PAGE: Got on the bus. 

BUSH: [05:40] Your grandma was the bus driver?

PAGE: My grandmother, Anita Coltrane, was my bus driver. Her bus number was Bus No. 7. 

BUSH: And she took care to make sure you got here. 

PAGE: No doubt! (Bush laughs) No doubt. 

BUSH: Made sure you behaved yourself, too.

PAGE: Made sure I behaved myself, yes.

BUSH: [05:55] So it was a whole mix of kids, of course: everything was integrated. 

PAGE: Yeah, by the time I came, everything was integrated. 

BUSH: [06:01] Teachers and kids—and how did that work? 

PAGE: There was no difference for me, because in the neighborhood I played with all of us, and when I came to school I just had more to play with.  

BUSH: Yeah, the kids were all from the area.

PAGE: All from the area. 

BUSH: [06:21] So how do you feel that your elementary school prepared you for high school and ultimately college? 

PAGE: It laid the foundation. It gave me that thirst for learning, even though somewhere across the way I kind of lost that—or as my grandmother would say, “You thought you were old enough to know better, but you didn’t do it.”  But it laid the foundation. It made me learn. It set up my study skills, taking note skills, handwriting—which they graded back that. So it just laid that foundation.

BUSH: Discipline.

PAGE: Yeah.

BUSH: [06:59] Well, what is your career right now?

PAGE: My degree says I have a Bachelor’s of Science in computer information systems and sciences. But right now, I am an administrative assistant at Piedmont Virginia Community College.

BUSH: So you’re involved in education.

PAGE: (laughs) Yeah I fell right in that station. 

BUSH: Look at that, you stuck with it.

PAGE: Stuck with it.

BUSH: Yeah, I mean that says something, the continuity there, all the way through of being able to understand education in different ways. 

PAGE: Yup.

BUSH: [07:37] What was the curriculum like? Do you remember your elementary school classes at all? Your homework—did you have homework?

PAGE: We did have homework. What—

BUSH: [07:48] Did you think it was hard, or was it easy? Was school easy for you? Did you have to read a lot? What was school like? 

PAGE: School, for me, it was a lot, because you had all of your courses. You had math, English, reading—all those in the middle of your day. That was your day. The most memorable thing was that we had to learn Roman numerals in fifth grade. I was like, “When will I ever, ever have to use Roman numerals ever again?” (Bush laughs) You know, that was a big thing, because it was difficult for me to learn Roman numerals—and that is the one thing I remember in fifth grade that we had to do. And do I use them now? Do I use them now? No. 

BUSH: They show up every once in a while.

PAGE: Yeah, in an outline. (laughs) That’s about it. But it was interesting. But that was the most memorable thing. 

BUSH: [08:44] That was one of the harder things?

PAGE: Yeah, that was definitely one of the harder things. And then also—for some reason, fifth grade for some reason just stands out—we played this game where you had to learn your multiplication tables. But Miss Lyle made it a game, where it was like Pass. You kept moving around the room, until you got one wrong, and then you had to sit down in that person’s spot, and then the next person took over. The object was, you had to go around the whole room and not miss any.  

BUSH: So the last one standing.

PAGE: Last one standing. It was fun. Did I win? No, but it was fun. (laughs) 

BUSH: It was a motivator.

PAGE: Exactly. 

BUSH: [09:24] That is good. And other extracurricular—did you do, like, singing? You said you had the jazz dance.

PAGE: We had the jazz dance. The one that was most memorable was we did The Wiz and we learned—like, I was in group-read, which was fun. But the choir was mixed in with your regular classroom activities. And Miss Wright was the choir director. 

BUSH: [09:54] So you had a choir class? 

PAGE: Yes. She would come in—I think it was maybe once a week—and you had choice for like an hour, hour-and-a-half. 

BUSH: [10:04] Good. Yeah, that’s rich? That’s rich. Anything else you can think of you want to mention?

PAGE: Hm, no, not at this moment. When I leave, I’ll probably have a thousand things I could’ve said. (laughter) 

BUSH: Well, thank you for sharing those memories.

PAGE: Thank you for doing this. 

BUSH: That Is very good. And that is Sharice Page. I appreciate that. Thank you.

PAGE: You’re welcome.

END OF TAPE [10:27]