Mattie Rials is under no illusion that she’ll live forever.
“At 89 years old, every day is a gift,” Miss Mattie, the longtime children’s librarian for the Pike-Amite-Walthall Library System said. “I’ll be gone in the blink of an eye, so I’m going to do what I can while I have time left.”
That includes doing a lot of the same things that won her acclaim and recognition, not to mention love and respect, from much of Southwest Mississippi — working with, educating and entertaining children, both as a kindergarten teacher and as the children’s librarian for the Pike-Amite-Walthall Library System.
Her efforts for more than 60 years won her recognition as a Golden Magnolia, a statewide recognition for women in cultural arts, science and medicine, philanthropy, food and entertainment and community advancement. Miss Mattie was recognized in cultural arts.
She was already working with children, her own and others, when she started working with a local kindergarten teacher who ran her own school.
But she didn’t have a lot of encouragement in that direction as a young woman.
“It was always such a special job to me,” Miss Mattie said. “Mama didn’t think much of it. She thought if a woman was going to work, she should wear a suit and go into an office every day.”
Miss Mattie was the last of four children, and a good bit younger than her two sisters and her brother, so she was almost like an only child as she grew up.
Her father was willing to tell stories to her and to her neighbor friends when they came to visit.
“He grew up in Amite County, and he would tell these scary stories,” she said. “The girl who lived next door would get so scared sometimes that we had to walk her home.”
In 1965, Miss Mattie bought the kindergarten she was working with from the retiring teacher and built a school space on the back of her and her husband Roger’s garage at their $8,000 house on Sixth Street, and she taught there for nine years with Sybil Hayman, aka country bumpkin Punie Mae.
“I always liked kids,” she said. “It’s fun to make stuff and play with children. I just love pretending, and they do, too.”
She picked up and dropped off her students each day, for $20 per month — $18.50 for tuition and $1.50 to ride to school and then back home in her Volkswagen minibus,
She had two shifts of pickup and dropoff each day, with her first set of pickups staying with Hayman while she picked up the rest of the students. At the end of the kindergarten day, she took the first group of students she picked up back home while the second group of students had time with Hayman.
The back seats were removed from the minibus, and the students rode standing up.
The kindergarten started activities at 8:30 a.m. and ended at 11:30 a.m., which avoided heavier morning and lunchtime traffic periods.
Driving the students “was a terrible responsibility,” Miss Mattie said. “I had to pull into and out of driveways and watch for the traffic. It was a different era.”
Even with those dangers hanging out there, she took her students on field trips during their school days. Sometimes they would ride the bus in town.
Other times, they might go in the VW to a field to see and maybe ride ponies, and at least once, they went to fly in an airplane.
At traffic signals Miss Mattie would sing and teach her young pupils “the Red Light Song,” and when K&B Pharmacy started selling purple trash cans that they could see around town, “I told them trolls lived in them, and when we saw one, everybody would shout, ‘Troll!’” she said.
“A lot of those children may have needed a psychiatrist when they grew up,” she joked.
Miss Mattie told her students that they needed permission from “Mr. Roger,” her husband, to go on some of their trips, and they heard it as “Mr. Rogers.”
“They thought it was Mr. Rogers from TV,” she said with a laugh. “He was the wind beneath my wings. He was a wonderful provider.”
One year, Miss Mattie had a student that liked to pretend he was making a fire and warming up next to and maybe cooking over it. Another student kept pretending to pour water over the fire to put it out.
“I consoled that poor little boy about his fire, and I told the other one, ‘You have to stop putting out his fire,’” she said.
On another occasion, she was bringing her students into the classroom and she fell out of the little chair she was trying to sit in before starting the day’s activities.
“I turned to the chair and I said, ‘What’s that? It’s your birthday? You don’t want to hold anybody on your birthday?’” she said. So, she and the class went out to put the chair on a city bus so it could go to “school” for the morning.
Her students went to their classroom and were unaware of the rest of Miss Mattie’s house until a little girl swinging in the play yard one day swung high enough to see part of the house and asked who lived there.
Thereafter, on the last day of their school year, Hayman would lead the graduates through Miss Mattie’s house.
“They would go through each of the rooms, and she would say, ‘This is where Miss Mattie sleeps’ and ‘this is where Miss Mattie takes a bath,’” Miss Mattie said with a chuckle.
For part of the kindergarten years, the classes had a white mouse in a cage that they could watch and care for. His name was Scooter.
Everything Miss Mattie came up with to teach and do with her students came from her imagination.
“I didn’t have any training,” she said. “That was before kindergarten was required. It’s different now — there’s so much emphasis on early childhood education.
“I just gave it my best. I loved it, and I did the best I could. There was no governing body to watch us or tell what we had to do, but I feel they would have been pleased if there had been.”
Miss Mattie decided to close her kindergarten in 1974.
Through much of the time she operated the kindergarten, she organized exhibits and artistic programs for the public, chiefly children, at the McComb library in the summer.
After closing the kindergarten, she eventually joined the library full-time as children’s librarian, creating the kinds of programs she has become known for in all of the library system’s libraries, from Crosby to Tylertown for infants, toddlers and preschoolers all the way up to teenagers.
Before starting there, though, “I didn’t know anything about working in a library,” Miss Mattie said. “My bosses all taught me so many things, and I loved them all. The library has always been like family.”
She has become quite close to Laura Stokes, who took over as the full-time children’s librarian when Miss Mattie retired and moved to volunteering her time at the library.
“She is so good, and she has been so good to me,” she said.
She noted how computers have become important to the operations of libraries, and said many staff meetings and training sessions over the years had been spent on learning about computers and their software.
It was a skill she never really mastered.
“Some people can do in five minutes what would take me five weeks to do,” she said.
Miss Mattie and the library just wouldn’t be the same without her special friend, Scooter Mouse.
Inspired by the little mouse that lived in the kindergarten, Scooter came to the old library downtown with a back story of traveling over from his home in Amite County to be a city mouse among the books.
Library Scooter’s namesake “was a wonderful creature, and so delicate,” Miss Mattie said. “It was just natural that Scooter would live at the library where he could read the newspapers and eat in the staff room.”
Scooter spent a while on the radio in his early days, providing bedtime stories sponsored by a local bank.
In more recent years, Scooter has been featured in five books written by Alice Rhea Mitchell and illustrated by Sheryl K. Perry. An earlier suggestion to bring Scooter to life was rebuffed, however.
“They wanted to make a cartoon of Scooter, but I thought that would ruin it,” she said. “It’s better to keep it in your head.
“I love Scooter Mouse. He’s just a lot of hot air, but he doesn’t cost anything. He’s just a pleasure, dear and sweet and All-American as apple pie.”
Scooter is known for sending notes with a caricature of him included in his signature and always backward E’s.
He salutes “bored members,” and once, in honor of a bulb award for the McComb Garden Club, presented his own congratulatory award — a potted light bulb.
Though Baptist, Scooter was willing to treat those of other religions just the same as his fellow Baptists, including former St. Alphonsus priest Father Brian Carroll.
Fr. Carroll was leaving the parish to return home to Ireland, and Scooter bid him farewell. Carroll responded “it was too bad Scooter was a Baptist mouse, because Catholic mice could have wine with their cheese,” Miss Mattie said.
A good Baptist herself, Miss Mattie said she loves and holds onto the message of Psalm 139, which begins, “O Lord, you have searched me and known me.”
“I believe that God has a purpose for me, and if you keep that, it drives you,” she said.
