Barbara Summerlin will be the first to tell you that she wasn’t qualified to do any job she held in her lifetime, but opportunity after opportunity kept opening up to her.

“I never had any training, but I gave it my all,” Summerlin said of her different career fields.

Summerlin was born in Mount Airy in 1934. Six weeks later, her family left to go to Delaware so that her father could find work.

“Because of the depression, there were no jobs in Mount Airy,” Summerlin recalled of her early years. The family lived in Delaware until she was 14 years old.

Summerlin was born in a house on Davis Street across from the old hospital on Cherry Street. She keeps a picture of that house, along with other photographs, letters and memorabilia in a scrapbook/photo album she put together for her children and her grandchildren.

When she was a child, she had long blonde hair with lots of freckles. But Summerlin hated her freckles and wanted more than anything to have dimples.

“You know how kids are. Someone told me that if you would Scotch tape pinto beans on either side of your mouth — then you could get dimples. I did it all the time, but I never did get any dimples,” Summerlin said smiling.

Her smile broadened when she pointed to a picture of her first boyfriend, George.

“I’ve never really cared for the name George, but my first boyfriend’s name was George. My first love in high school was named George, and I married a George,” she explained.

Summerlin’s only sister was born in Delaware before the family moved home to Mount Airy to take care of her ailing grandmother. Her sister is now living in Charlotte.

What most people don’t know about Summerlin is that when she first graduated from high school, she went to nursing school in Charlotte.

“A lot of people never knew that I went to Charlotte Memorial School of Nursing. The reason I set out to do it is because that’s all we could afford to do. My dad was a policeman and mother worked at Spencer’s. They didn’t have the money for me to go to college. I wanted to go to college so bad because all of my friends were going and because I was a good student. I had no interest in nurses training other than my mother’s youngest sister was a nurse in Charlotte. I thought, ‘Well, I’ll give that a try.’”

But nursing didn’t suit Summerlin, so by the beginning of the second year of nursing school, she met a young man who was just getting out of the Korean War and got married. Al Case was the father of Summerlin’s three children.

She said Case worked for a European company that sold these large printing presses.

“So he would open up offices for the company. We lived in Norfolk and Richmond. And this was the last house we lived in, in Charlotte when we got our divorce,” she explained while looking at a picture of the house.

Summerlin was a stay-at-home mom.

“I loved the idea of mothers being able to stay home and look after the children. I was married four years before I had three children in three and a half years. So staying home with them was a wonderful reward. I really enjoyed it,” Summerlin remembered.

When she and her husband separated, she called her parents to let them know. They wanted her and the children to come visit for the weekend.

“So I came and they spent the whole weekend trying to convince me not to get a divorce,” Summerlin explained. “That’s how much the idea of divorce has changed. My entire family tried to talk me out of it.”

While in Charlotte, Summerlin became the secretary for the Mecklenburg PTA.

“So I got interested in the schools. My neighbor was the principal at a new school that was opening called Albermarle Road Junior High School and it was a model school. They were going to be experimenting with curriculum. There were a lot of liberties allowed. Mr. Brooks told me that they would be looking for someone to be an audio-visual specialist. He thought with proper training I could do that job. With the help of some relatives who kept the children, I trained all that summer and when school opened we had a media department that you wouldn’t believe. This was in the 1960s. I directed and produced a children’s television program with students. It’s so funny how I remember early morning when we came on, our theme song was ‘Here Comes the Sun’ by the Beetles,” Summerlin remembered.

She said working at the school was a wonderful experience. But at the same time, cross busing started. She said many of her friends started putting their children into private school to avoid it, but she couldn’t afford such a luxury. Her parents told her they would give her a piece of land next to their home in Mount Airy.

“We moved home because my daughter, who was starting first grade, was being bused 22 miles each way and we lived three blocks from the school,” Summerlin said.

When she returned home, she briefly worked at Ray’s Restaurants office where she did some training films.

“I remember doing a training film on how they wanted French fries cooked. And we used the music of dueling banjos. It was real neat with the potatoes hopping.”

Shortly after that, a job became open at Cross Creek Country Club. Summerlin was hired as the general manager. That was in 1978 around the same time she met her second husband, George Summerlin. He was the publisher of The Mount Airy News at that time.

“He was aware of my management skills and he knew that I loved to write. He gave me a wonderful opportunity to do that. I may never have had that opportunity if it hadn’t of been for him. I am very grateful for that,” she said.

Back then, the newspaper only published three times a week. Summerlin became the first woman editor of The News in 1979.

“A lot of people would say to me, ‘How do you live together and work together?’ It was a beautiful experience because we both loved the newspaper business. It was about 20 years of excitement watching the newspaper grow. I was so grateful that George gave me so much freedom,” Summerlin said.

“It always made me feel good when I wrote things and I got feedback on them,” she said.

Summerlin was popular for her column called “For Goodness Sake.” She also started the publication, Simple Pleasures.

Then in 1995, George threw her a surprise birthday/retirement party at Cross Creek Country Club.

Over the course of her career, she had written more than 600 columns. She picked out the best 60 and made them into a book called, “Wisdom Cometh With Age.”

“I picked the ones that I thought people would be the most interested in, in their own lives.”

Summerlin had many “firsts” in her life. She was also the first woman to be a director of the Greater Mount Airy Chamber of Commerce.

She created the first brochure on tourism for The Mount Airy News. She was also general chairman of the Autumn Leaves Festival.

Summerlin helped plan Mount Airy’s Centennial Celebration in 1985. Out of that came the idea for the War Memorial that now graces downtown. She said George Summerlin and Richard Vaughn raised the money for the monument. She helped with the design and did all of the research for the names that were place on the memorial.

“We had never had anything like that — a gathering place in Mount Airy,” she said.

She was named “Citizen of the Year” in 1986. She attributes that to her tireless efforts on the Centennial committee.

She said Vaughn also teased her relentlessly about her desire to put an elevator in the Mount Airy Museum of Regional History. She starting working on that project in 1988 before it was even a reality.

“I spent six years there as an unpaid director so that we could use the money to pay for exhibits. My only regret about that is that it tore into my Social Security money,” Summerlin said.

She was also one of the organizers of the local Altrusa International Club. She was the first president of that club.

She was one of the first women to serve on the vestry at Trinity Episcopal Church in the early 1970s.

In 1999, she received the Hester B. Jackson Heritage Award for her work with history through the museum.

Two of the most gratifying things Summerlin says she has done in her lifetime is to establish two endowed scholarships, one at Surry Community College and one at Mount Airy High School. Her only requirement is that the student have an interest in history or in journalism.

“I feel that those are wonderful careers. I couldn’t have had a better life than I had working in those fields,” she said.

She and George are now divorced. She is currently living in an apartment at RidgeCrest Retirement Community. She is putting her home at 125 Hickory Hill Road on the market in the very near future. Although she doesn’t want to let go, she knows it is time to let someone else enjoy the property.

Summerlin penned two other books. One is called “The Hollows.” The other is “The Legacy of Ada, A Mountain Woman.” She is working on another book now about her experience with growing older.

One of Summerlin’s favorite quotes she lives by comes from the Mr. Roger’s TV show.

“‘Everybody has a story, and if you knew their story, you would love them,’ because when you get to know someone that’s how you love them and bond with them. I also believe that everybody can write, if they want to write. Plus I think they all have a story to tell.”

Contact Mondee Tilley at mtilley@mtairynews.com or at 719-1930.