She was born Nell Lyle Newman in McDonough, Ga., on October 8, 1899. Her father was a local businessman here and a couple of years before she was born her parents moved into one of the prettiest houses in McDonough on Jonesboro Street, just west of the train tracks. The house stands there today and the current owners are Fred and Gail Welch Talmadge Notti.

  She grew up in McDonough and went to Agnes Scott College to become a teacher. She started off teaching in McDonough, then Rockdale County and finally in Atlanta Public Schools. In 1960 she retired from Atlanta Schools and moved back to a little brick house on the corner of Cleveland Street and began teaching eighth grade english at McDonough Elementary where Mr. Toobs Mobley was the principal. Some of Miss Newman’s teaching methods were considered very different for the time and they certainly wouldn’t fit today’s rules.

  A normal day in her classroom started with the class recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by a prayer and the reading of a passage of scripture that she just called up from memory. As she stood in front of the open classroom windows at McDonough Elementary, she would cross her arms and clasp her elbows with her fingers while reciting as the cool air would fill the classroom.

  Her dress was most conservative and her favorite color (if you were one of her students you remember it) was black. Her sense of humor was a little “black” as  well, with her telling students that she was a witch with “special powers.” She had her students convinced that if they behaved badly she would put a spell on them. She also told her students about “Jasper” her pet wasp and “Isaac,”  her pet fly. Both Jasper and Isaac had small rocking chairs on her living room mantel and quite often she took Jasper to school to watch her students in case she needed to leave the room for a few minutes. Now Jasper was of course that wasp that always flew into the open windows of the classroom, swooping and buzzing and diverting the attention of the students from the diagrams of sentences on the board.

  One of her favorite sayings was the answer to this question. “Miss Newman, what ARE the parts of speech?” The parts of speech, she would say, “are the eight little molds into which we pour our thoughts.”

  All of her students had to learn to recite the prepositions in alphabetical order. They started with ‘aboard’ and ended with ‘without.’ I am sure that every one of her students remember having to learn the prepositions and, after all these years, most of them can still recite them. That is how good of a teacher she was, she wanted her students to know this information because they also learned obedience, concentration and the power of knowing something that not many people knew.

  She didn’t drive in her later years and had a dear friend named Otis who owned a black 1950 Ford Coupe. He kept his car as shiny as a new penny. Every morning Otis would drive her, Jasper and Isaac to school and every afternoon he would pick them up and carry Miss Newman to run errands and then dropped them off at home.

  In 1966 she retired for the second time in her teaching career and ended up with many hours to fill each day.  She kept her brain sharp with recitation, reading and studying. In later years, one of her favorite pastimes was talking and visiting with former students.

  On November 5, 1991 at the age of 92, she was laid to rest at the Newman family plot at the McDonough City Cemetery.

  Smitty Phillips, one of her first students at McDonough Elementary wrote his memory of what Miss Newman meant to him. It was a very moving tribute to a fine lady who left her mark on her students. Below is part  of his tribute.

  “Today I sit in a chapel. Before me is a box containing the body that carried Miss Nell Newman’s spirit. My thoughts sped through the intervening years back to 1960. I am again thirteen years old. She is my eighth grade English teacher. I sit in class in total wonderment. Teaching me is the most eloquent, exquisite lady I have ever seen. She is tall and thin with sharp features and midnight black hair. Her eyes, dark and piercing, look through me to the depths of my soul. I cannot hide.” At the end of the letter, Smitty added “and yes, Miss Newman, I still remember the prepositions.”

  For all of her former students, lets give it a try and recite the 55 prepositions in order for Miss Newman just one more time. She would be proud!   “Aboard, about, above, across, after, against, along, amid among, around, at, before, behind, below, beneath, beside, besides, between, beyond, but, by, concerning, despite, down, during, except, for, from, in, inside, into, like, near, of, off, on, out, outside, over, past, since, through, throughout, till, to toward, towards, under, underneath, until, up, upon, with within, without.”