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Honoring Margaret Wellford Tabor ’55 | Alumna & Retired Hutchison Faculty
Honoring Margaret Wellford Tabor ’55 | Alumna & Retired Hutchison Faculty
MARGARET WELLFORD TABOR ’55 | ALUMNA & RETIRED HUTCHISON FACULTY
Hutchison is proud to honor Margaret Wellford Tabor as the Anne Marie Newton Walker ’47 Philanthropy Award recipient, created in recognition of Anne Marie’s passion for service to her alma mater. This award is presented to an alumna who advances philanthropy to Hutchison through personal giving and serves as an inspiration to the larger community.
Margaret loves Hutchison fiercely. She has known the school as a student, alumna, faculty member, and parent and grandparent of students and alumnae. In fact, she has known seven heads of school at Hutchison. She also has been a loyal donor to Hutchison for more than 30 years. We appreciate her wisdom, knowledge, friendship, and support.
We’ve invited her daughters to tell you a little bit about Margaret’s life.
Margaret Wellford Tabor ’55: Our Mother and Beloved Hutchison Teacher
By Kyle Tabor Furr ’81 and Mary Tabor Engel ’82
Margaret Tabor ’55 with her daughters, Kyle Tabor Furr ’81 (left) and Mary Tabor Engel ’82 (right); son, Wellford Tabor; husband, Dr. Owen Tabor Sr.; and son, Dr. Owen Tabor Jr.
One September morning, some 80 years ago, an eager five-year-old hopped out of her carpool, and with little white socks and saddle oxford shoes, walked into her first day of kindergarten at Miss Hutchison’s School on Union Avenue in Memphis.
With a neatly placed barrette holding her sandy brown hair out of her eyes, she smiled shyly, brimming with excitement. Her mother had regaled her with tales of Hutchison classes and friendships. Her grandmother, a middle school principal, had played reading and math games with her for as long as she could remember. She knew that learning was fun. And from the moment she stepped into Miss Taylor’s kindergarten class, this little girl knew she was in her right place.
Fifteen years later, this young woman returned home from Connecticut College and answered a call from Hutchison’s then Head of School, Dr. William Atkinson. An English major, Margaret began her teaching career at Hutchison as a middle school science and penmanship teacher, determined to share her love of learning with her young students.
Mary Tabor Engel ’82 with mother Margaret
Soon graduate school at Duke University, marriage, and military service called this young teacher away from Memphis, but not for long.
By the late 1960s, she returned with her young family and enrolled her two daughters at Hutchison and began to teach. Her reputation as an effective, joyful teacher who could engage even the most distracted student soon became legend. This “Jill-of-all-trades” taught AP classes, pitched in with college counseling, helped with SAT prep, and taught sex ed. She was even recruited to handle rowdy classes full of MUS boys.
Over the years, our mother shared her love of literature, poetry, history, and drama with students ranging from second graders to seniors. She inspired students to think beyond the confines of race, gender, religion, and economic status. She helped young women find their voices and write clearly. She believed every student had a meaningful story to tell.
Margaret as senior English teacher
In later years, by the time she turned in her final set of grades, our beloved mother had taught and mentored thousands of students. She was honored to be chosen by one of Hutchison’s Presidential Scholars as that student’s most influential teacher. She had a regular stream of forever students who still stop by our house and stay for a long time, seek her out at random gatherings, or track her down in the grocery store just to thank her for teaching them to love Shakespeare. She still loves to explore literature’s wisdom and humanity, from Shakespeare to Wright, from Austen to Capote.
In addition to teaching, she has worked as a cheerful alumna volunteer. Over the past 65 years, she has shared her time, talent, and treasure. If she wasn’t working full time, she regularly filled in as a substitute to help those teachers who might need a little time off.
Our mother has taught us to give back to our schools, and to remember that participation is much more important than the dollar amount. Mom said even $10 a year is enough, just do it every year. For more than half a century, she has given generously to Hutchison every single year, never needing pushing nor prodding.
Hutchison has been by far our mother’s most beloved of institutions. It is not just family to her. It is mission. It is passion. It is celebration. She refers to Hutchison regularly and easily as her home. She still speaks with love and awe about teachers who nurtured and inspired her, and classmates with whom she shared happy experiences.
According to Margaret
What was your favorite book to teach?
I don’t know that I had a favorite book. But Laurence Perrine’s Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry, and Understanding Fiction by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, were both excellent guides for teaching. We could read the great writers’ short fiction and poetry and learn about the voice and style of each writer. When Bob Lynn hired me to teach, he told me I could design my own course. I was floored. But he said he needed me to teach writing and composition, so we used those books as a guide. For example, for one quiz I took the fairy tale of “Cinderella” and wrote different paragraphs in the voice of different authors, such as Joyce, Hawthorne, or Faulkner, and the students had to match the writers and the corresponding style paragraph.
What is your favorite novel?
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Because, well, I don’t know. I just have read it over and over. It is so classical that every time I read it, Austen seems to address the current problems in the world. It is just so well written.
What is your favorite play by Shakespeare?
If I had to pick one play that I have read and taught more, it would be Hamlet. It contains a wealth of insight and wisdom, of trying to understand man’s search for meaning in life.
Do you have a favorite Shakespeare quotation?
In As You Like It, Celia fusses at Rosalind for talking all the time. Rosalind’s response is: “When I think, I must speak.”
What is something students will remember about you and your class?
I think what they liked the most about my teaching is that I really liked being there with them, and I liked teaching. I expected them to be disciplined, and I expected them to study. I gave them a PLQ (Picky Little Quiz) every single day. I was tough, but I knew that they could do it. I had lots of padding in my tests, so nobody ever failed one. I had ways for everybody to do relatively well, but it was also challenging for the very top students. I never gave the same test twice. EVER.
What is something you will remember most about your students?
That I looked forward to going to Hutchison to teach them every day. They were all di erent. They were from everywhere and every place, and for the most part, they were good classmates. They were good team players. It was a very pleasant atmosphere to teach in.
What is one of your favorite trips you’ve taken and why?
Oh, there was a time when my husband, Owen, said that we had to have a theme when we were traveling, so we went to discover where Camelot might have been. That was probably my favorite trip.
To read more “According to Margaret” Q&As online, including memories of her favorite teachers, go to the following link: hutchisonschool.org/margaret-tabor55
