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Bv THERESA REYNOLDS
Rappahannock News Special Writer
When friends gather this Saturday to honor Mary Botts Quaintance at the Elementary School, the crowd will be only a portion of the thousands of Rappahannock people whose lives she has touched in her teaching career of half a century. As a young teacher and later, as principal of the Rappahannock Elementary School, Mrs. Quaintance knows, by name and face, virtually all the county residents who passed through the school system between 1925 and 1976.
And names and faces are not all that Mrs. Quaintance learned. She knew the children who came from troubled homes; the families that needed encouragement to educate their children at a time when their help was valuable on the farm; the young people who might break the cycle of poverty and ignorance if they could learn a useful skill; even the places that she might find a youngster playing hooky.
“There were some children whose parents had to leave for work before the school bus came,” she remembered. “Those were the ones I learned to track down. One child, a Sperryville boy, used to hang out at the store when he skipped school. I’d just call the store and talk to him, ask him to come on to school. He always came.”
Other times, Mrs. Quaintance sent the assistant superintendent or Wilson Atkins, the janitor, out in her car to pick up truant children. • “One time there were four Amissville boys, all friends, missing at once. I knew they must be together somewhere, probably at the house of the boy whose parents weren’t home. I sent out the assistant principal to get them. When he came in they were drinking beer, playing cards, AND smoking cigarettes,” she said. “He told me later that it took everything he had not to laugh. They’d been caught redhanded and they couldn’t think of which to hide first.”
The personal approach characterized everything Mrs. Quaintance undertook. She’s responsible for the dental health program that has helped countless Rappahannock children over the years. “I had a car with a rumble seat,” she said. “And that rumble seat got lots of children to the dentist who wouldn’t have gone otherwise.”
Her interest in dental health started when she was a beginning ► teacher, in 1930.
“It was obvious to me that most of our rural children were healthy except for their teeth,” she said. “It was a shame to see a beautiful young girl or boy with rotten teeth.”
At first Mrs. Quaintance took the children to dentists in Culpeper, dentists that she talked into donating their services. So well developed were her powers of persuasion that at one time there were three dentists who were available to fix the teeth of Rappahannock school children. By then, the young teacher was bringing them by bus instead of by rumble seat.
As local dentists built up their practices, they stopped donating their time. But Mrs. Quaintance always had an angle. “Because Ruby Jenkins (who at that time worked in the Extension Office) had been of such assistance to a wealthy landowner, we were given a generous donation to carry on our work. With this money, we paid dentists just out of dental school to help our school children. Two of them, Drs. Ferlazzo and Aylor, settled in Culpeper and practice there now.”
Later, a retired dentist joined the ranks of Mary Quaintance’s volunteers. He brought his own equipment, which he set up at the Washington High School. When he returned to active practice in Falls Church, he left his equipment behind and it found a home in Frances Thornton’s office at the health de
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