Women's Tribute: Carolyn Potts

Carolyn Potts is a longtime McKenzie resident who has left her mark on the community as an educator and as a beacon of resilience.

She was born in Pennsylvania to Glenn and Frances Elizabeth “Betty” Norris and grew up in Roanoke, Va. and later northern Virginia.

Carolyn attended the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina at Greensborough until she married her first husband, Charles, an Air Force Reservist. They were stationed overseas in northern Japan for about 18 months, during which Carolyn had her first child, Charles, and also took courses through the University of Maryland.

On returning to the U.S., they lived in Charlottesville, Va. Carolyn graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in Education, though she had been a History major.

At UVA, she took classes under Education and History professor Dr. Jim Potts. She told The Banner, “I didn’t care much for Dr. Potts because the first class I took under him was Education and I thought it was terribly boring and the information was useless… until I got in the classroom.”

Later, Carolyn had separated from Charles and took a summer course from Potts. She said, “I was fascinated and I guess I fell in love with him then, with his voice and intellect.”

She added, “I married the two smartest men that I had ever met.”

She and Jim moved to Nashville, then came to McKenzie in 1964, the year their son, Jimmy was born.

Carolyn said, “We’ve been here ever since and grown to be very happy here and to like McKenzie very much, and to give to the community and be part of the community. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in particular.”

She said of the importance of her education, “I had always had ambitions. It had never, ever occurred to me not to go to college. I always wanted to go to school. As you can see, everywhere I went, I went to school.”

Carolyn spoke about her and Jim’s arrival at Bethel. “It might have had 2-300 people, but they were short on faculty. And they were very happy to have Jim, because he taught the whole range of social sciences. The first class I taught here, they needed somebody to teach a night class in World History. I had never had World History. I was a History major but I had never had World History. Did that matter? Apparently not. So I taught my first class here.

“I ended up teaching for four years. Some of the happiest years of my life. I still get cards from some of my students, still close to a few. I taught four classes a day, three histories and a political science, three times a week. I didn’t have a masters degree, so I taught as what amounts to a student assistant. I technically taught under Jim, and he did a lot of the writing of what I taught. So I got to be an actress, more, sometimes, than actually knowing the material.”

She also worked on a call-in radio show on WKTA with Kent Jones, which led her to meet Frank Taylor, director of the Northwest Tennessee Economic Development Corporation branch in McKenzie.

Taylor hired Carolyn to organize daycare centers, “about which I knew nothing whatsoever.”

Then, Taylor got a grant for a new program that he was extremely interested in, Head Start. “Mr. Taylor was a school man; he had been a superintendent. And he was determined we were going to have a Head Start program in our area. So we started the first program here at Webb [School]. They gave us a little room there. I think I had five or six kids. Jimmy was still real little then, and he would sit in on the classes sometimes. We lived. The kids made it, and I made it. I don’t know how much they learned, but that was the beginning of Head Start.”

Carolyn taught there for one year before another opportunity came to her. She taught history on an educational program on WLJT-TV in Martin for one season.

Next, she worked for another program, an aging agency. “I was to be over the whole thing, and I did not do a good job. I felt very fish-out-of-water. But I learned a lot of what was available for senior citizens, what programs there could have been, how things could have been done.

“I heard about a Retired Senior Volunteer Program (RSVP), and it seemed like something that our area desperately needed and would be great for senior citizens. Jim and I managed to put together a grant and got it for here. It was based at Bethel. I ran that for four years. It was very successful. The whole premise was, we’ve got so many senior citizens in our area who have either retired or they have time on their hands, and so many things need to be done that we can’t afford. We would place volunteers in various things like helping the schools, anything that was nonprofit. They received no money; it was strictly volunteer. We had senior citizens from all over the county serving in various volunteer positions. I met a lot of people, and we did a lot of good, I think, for four years. I think I had the largest in the area. That was my last paying job.”

The local RSVP ended when government funding went away.

Though she hasn’t had a “job” since, she has remained active in her community.

She was an early supporter of Carroll Arts, for years spearheading the annual storytelling event held during Huntingdon’s Heritage Festival.

She’s a member of the Inglenook Book Club and is active in the Carroll County Democratic Party.

She is an avid collector of many things and a lifelong movie lover, something she attributes to her father’s job at 20th Century Fox. A longtime general sales manager and eventually a VP, his position even led to her meeting Ava Gardner and Johnny Ray in her youth.

Carolyn has lived for many years with multiple sclerosis, though it has only slowed her down a step.

She spoke about her diagnosis and experience. “I was teaching at Bethel, not too many years in. My eyes went first. I went to a specialist in Union City, and he told Dr. Potts (not me) that he had seen the lesions in my eyes that were similar to what he had seen before that indicated multiple sclerosis. Jim didn’t tell me, but the eye doctor gave him the hint.

And then I started the numbing which is very typical on the arms and legs. It doesn’t keep me from moving or anything. It’s just a funny feeling that nobody could explain. You can tell when you touch yourself that it doesn’t feel like the rest of you. You just have this funny numbing feeling, and I was walking awkwardly.

“Eventually, it took me to Memphis for a diagnosis. They diagnosed MS and the prognosis was a wheelchair in five years. They kind of messed up on that one. [Carolyn used just a cane for many years, and now, primarily just a walker.]

“Oddly, I wasn’t scared. I don’t know why. I guess it was because at first the symptoms that came went away. The eye thing, the numbing, the walking awkwardly. At one point I was paralyzed up to [her upper chest] and that went away. It would come and go. And there wasn’t any point in panicking about it. There wasn’t much you could do about it.”

She noted the two kinds of MS, remitting and progressive. “Mine’s slow, progressive, that’s supposed to be the bad one. But for me it has not been, I have been very fortunate.

“Some years later, my sister, Glenda, called and told me she had it too, and I cried. It just broke my heart. I felt like it was my fault.”

Carolyn spoke about the progress of women in her lifetime. “I think now so many women are just doing it on their own. They take a look and say, ‘Hey, the world needs changing, and I can help, and I can do.’ So, women are just doing it without asking.

“There have been enormous changes over my lifetime, from following to leading, and we’ve got a lot more leaders now. A lot more women who stand up.”

Besides her sons, Charles, who died at age 20, and Jimmy, Jim also had two daughters prior to their marriage.

Carolyn has four grandchildren, Jessa, Chuck, Tyler and Anna, and two great-grandchildren.

She cited her caretaker since 2010, Rhonda Montgomery, with her quality of life as she nears age 90. “I could not live the life I live without her.”