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By HELEN RUISI
Rappahannock News Contributing Writer
The battered 1968 red MG is as familiar a sight to Wakefield students as its driver Tara Welty, the Class of 1986 valedictorian. Tara calls the car, which belonged to her father, the late Frederick Welty, her life. Through tinkering, coddling, and no small amount of love, Tara has kept the car running.
Speaking with Tara, her teachers or friends, one gains the impression that she enjoys meeting challenges: be it keeping the vintage car in running condition, earning her pilot’s license (her father was a pilot for United Airlines), or achieving nearmastery of five languages.
Tara is not just a familiar face at Wakefield; she is an institution. She entered Wakefield in the first grade and is the first 12-year student to be graduated. She has taken almost every course offered in the curriculum. During the closing exercises for the primary and grammar schools, Headmaster William E. Lynn used Tara as an example for the younger students, commenting that “she has taken the hard road during her years at Wakefield, the path that many students don’t choose to take.”
Her course load routinely consisted of three languages in addition to the required English, history, math and science. The years of hard work paid off this year as Tara was accepted at 10 colleges and offered two prestigious scholarship awards: one from the Virginia Scholars Program, the other from Columbia University. She has elected to attend the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
The hard work has not been limited to school. Her family moved to their farm in Washington, Virginia, when Tara was an infant. She enjoys living in the country, and she added that it gave her more responsibility earlier in life because if was a job.
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