By Clover Carroll
Margie Shepherd is a woman of many facets. Teacher, artist, traveler, activist, and her newest gig: published author. On the evening of May 10, 40 friends, colleagues, and former students crowded into Over the Moon Bookstore to hear Shepherd read funny and poignant stories aloud from her recently published memoir, Double Vision. In the tradition of Booth Tarkington and Edna Ferber, Shepherd’s collection of homespun family stories takes us back to her relatively idyllic childhood in the Crozet-sized town of Valhalla, New York, 30 miles north of New York City, during the 1950s and ’60s. Written in a plain, straightforward style, her nostalgic tales—some several pages long, others half page vignettes—of big Sunday feasts, drive-in movies, hitchhiking, drug experimentation, and skinny dipping will ring a bell with readers of a certain age, while the hijinks of her seven brothers and two sisters and her memories of being a young adult in a bygone Charlottesville hold universal appeal.
Margaret Walsh was second-to-youngest of ten children of an organ-playing, vegetable-gardening FBI agent whose primary responsibilities involved investigating organized crime and the Mafia in the New York area. Her mother was primarily a homemaker, but later taught elementary school.
Several of the stories feature the effect her father’s profession had on the family. When her brother answered a phone caller’s request to speak to Bill Walsh with “this is Bill Walsh,” the caller replied, “I’m going to kill you.”
“Hold on,” Bill said calmly. “You must want to speak to my father.”
When no one would admit hitting a baseball through an upstairs window, her father brought out paper and an ink pad and lined everyone up. “By the time he got to whoever was the guilty party, he had his confession.”
Shepherd loved the stories her father would tell at Sunday dinner, and so did his friend, the poet Billy Collins, who often joined them. When the FBI tried to transfer the family to Pittsburgh, her father wrote an appeal to J. Edgar Hoover explaining the difficulty of relocating the cow they maintained to provide milk for his ten children. Hoover granted his request to stay in Valhalla, although in point of fact there never was any cow.
“I’ve always been a storyteller,” Shepherd noted. “I used them in my teaching and my public life. I started writing them down for my four daughters while I was still working. I would get up at 5:30 a.m. to write before school.”
Many of our readers will remember Shepherd as a beloved teacher of English, geography, civics/economics, and humanities at Henley Middle School, where she taught for 25 years until her retirement in 2011. She also organized the annual Geography Bee, ran the Peace by Piece program that raised funds for student-selected charities, and led self-designed language immersion trips to Guatemala for students and teachers.
Her book relates her experiences attending elementary and high school at School of the Holy Child Jesus, college years at Mary Washington—where she majored in studio art—and graduate school in education at U.Va. Along the way she taught at Oakland School (a residential school for the learning disabled in Boyd Tavern), was active in the Albemarle Education Association, and became a National Board Certified teacher.
Friends in her writing group encouraged Shepherd to revise and publish the stories. After some research she settled on Lulu.com, a self-publishing service that prints, markets, and sells the book for you. The book’s title stems from the fact that Shepherd herself suffered from double vision throughout her childhood, discovering this only at age 32 while testing other students. The title also alludes to the fact that she is re-visiting, re-envisioning these stories a second time after having lived them long ago. Shepherd’s future plans include collecting stories about teaching and raising her children as well an art project she has in the works.
She encourages everyone to write down their stories. “Everybody has them. Write them down for your family to remember—you won’t be here forever.” For a trip back to a simpler time—when young children could wander the streets of New York safely, and kids made money by bagging groceries or selling lemonade—visit www.lulu.com to order a copy.
