Eve Cheatham

Hartselle City Schools

Secondary Teacher of the Year

BY REBEKAH YANCEY PHOTO CONTRIBUTED

Eve Cheatham is in her eighth year at Hartselle Junior High School where she teaches seventh and eighth grade mathematics. Her career in education spans three decades. She was chosen by her peers as the Secondary Teacher of the Year for Hartselle City Schools. Eve has been married to her high school sweetheart and Air Force retiree, Jeff Cheatham, for more than thirty years. She is a proud mother to Katherine, an AP English teacher at Austin High School, and mother-in-law to Hayden, an oncology nurse at Huntsville Hospital. She has two golden retrievers and a mean fluffy cat. She enjoys ringing with her church handbell choir, tailgating in Tuscaloosa on football game days, watching Marvel, Star Wars and Harry Potter films/tv shows, and traveling to the Smokey’s or Disney.

What made you go into education, specifically secondary education?

Eve says building relationships is what led her to her career in education. As an elementary and secondary student in the Hartselle City School system, she was one of those kids who truly loved her classes, her school and her teachers. A graduate of Hartselle High, Athens State and the University of West Alabama, Eve says she continues to find joy in teaching her junior high students the importance of forging lasting relationships within a building. Her experiences as an educator, military wife, and mom have taken her from the diverse communities of Valdosta, Georgia, and to the island of Guam.

How has your role as a teacher evolved over the 22 years you’ve been in the classroom?

Eve says there have been terrific technological advances that provide much more support for struggling students. There are also higher expectations for teachers.

What advice would you share with people who are interested in becoming teachers?

“You have to be willing to think, walk and talk teacher for the better part of your life,” Eve says. “You are defined by our profession; you are a teacher and a role model. You have to truly love what and who you teach. The commitments are many- but immeasurable in quality.”

Did you have a teacher or teachers who made a special impact on you in school?

Eve says several Hartselle teachers impacted her school years in various ways. “Charlotte Riddlehover (third grade math) showed me that I was pretty good at math, Glenda Wright (fifth grade math) made me fall in love with Geometric constructions, Nancy Pressnell (seventh grade math) showed me that girls could be great and even competitive in math through math team competitions, Sylvia Teague (ninth grade and Algebra II) demonstrated to me that a math teacher must work just as hard as her students; teach bell to bell, leaving no time to play.

Donna Legg-Battles (ninth-12th grades) taught me that we must champion one another in all our endeavors; she remains my biggest cheerleader as a professional mathematician; William Booth (11th-12th grade) showed me that teachers can make errors, laugh at themselves, be silly, yet professional, and be at ease with oneself.

If you had to teach a class on a deserted island, what are the five indispensable things you would take with you?

Mechanical Pencils (I call them Penskiies), College Rule Paper, Calculators (I have named mine Root-y), Trident Tropical Twist Gum and Gatorade (Fruit Punch or Cherry!)

STORY BY JACOB HATCHER

PHOTOS BY RACHEL HOWARD

WWhen Victoria Tutwiler made her first batch of sugar cookies in 2016, she would have never dreamed she would find herself sitting in her own retail cookie shop, decorating cookies while she discussed the beginnings of her business.

“I tried to do sugar cookies for Christmas and didn’t realize they took six hours – and I started an hour before we had to leave,” Tutwiler said. While the cookies did not turn out quite as she expected, Tutwiler’s spirit was not broken and for Easter 2017 she decided to make another attempt at her own tasty treats.

“I thought we needed something to hand out at church, so I texted the church leadership and asked if they would like me to make some cookies. They said they would love that and asked me to make 300 packets of cookies. I’d never done anything like that before but I said, ‘Sure! I’ll do it!”

The next year Tutwiler made cookies for Easter again, and then began to get requests from friends and family for birthday parties, baby showers and bridal parties. What started as a batch of very basic sugar cookies made on a whim turned into royal iced character cookies in short order. Tutwiler says her husband raised an eyebrow when she began buying expensive equipment after having only made a few batches of cookies, but she knew she was onto something.

“At the start of this I owned and ran a cleaning company. I’m doing all of these cookies on top of that and hadn’t really thought about doing this for a living, but then I lost childcare in February 2019 so I just decided to do cookies. I had the stuff to do it, so I decided I would just do it.”

For a couple of years, orders came pouring in from friends and then eventually she was being contacted by people she didn’t know who had seen her cookies on social media and at mutual friends’ events. In 2020, Tutwiler purchased a screen printer and, after a significant learning curve, she found herself being connected with a group in Huntsville called Trade Bank.

“I went to a Trade Bank gathering and made a cookie with all of their companies logos on it, but I didn’t know the Trash Pandas were going to be there,” Tutwiler said, “but the finance executive for (team) had one of my cookies and called me two or three weeks later wanting cookies for her food service director, park director and a few others because they wanted to try my cookies.”

That was in August 2021, and in October, the Trash Pandas reached out wanting Tutwiler to be the cookie vendor for their Winter Wonderland, a forty-seven day event with Christmas lights, vendors and entertainment. When she agreed to take on the Winter Wonderland event, she had two weeks to prepare for having a cookie hut with decorating sets fully stocked daily as well as having a booth to sell cookies in for four hours each night.

“I was staying up after I got home baking cookies, waking up and baking cookies,” she said. “Just to have stuff there. It was bananas.”

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All of this baking was still being done in Tutwiler’s home, and she knew that if she was going to continue on the trajectory she had been on, she would need a commercial kitchen. After a few leads for a commercial kitchen fell through, Tutwiler received a call with an opportunity she never saw coming. Following a whirlwind weekend, a deal was finally struck for retail space in downtown Hartselle.

In early October 2022, Oh Darling Sugar Cookie Co. opened its doors on Main Street.

“I just started baking up cookies I had and making more and thought, ‘I’ll open up and just see what happens.’ Our first day we sold 900 cookies,” she said. “I had fifteen people at one time just standing here waiting for me to bake cookies because I had nothing left.”

Tutwiler said she never had any aspirations to have a retail store. When she first started baking cookies, it was just something fun to do, and she never imagined being where she is today. “I’ve learned to just never say never, because it’s probably going to happen.”

Having been hunkered down in her home all of these years, Tutwiler finds having a retail space in Hartselle surprisingly refreshing.

“Hartselle has been very welcoming. It’s been nice to have people come in and to have people stand in my window and watch me decorate. And God’s really had His hand in every situation. That’s why I can stay motivated, because God wouldn’t have given me all of my these opportunities for me to fail.”

Oh Darling Sugar Cookie Company is located at 307 Main Street W.