Last week’s news about a fire in an Augusta County trailer park involved my two favorite teachers from the former Crimora Elementary School, Donald and Iva Dixon.
The Dixons lost their home in the Dec. 12 fire, which also did significant damage to a trailer next door, according to published reports.
The media reports didn’t identify the Dixons, who have long since retired from teaching, and faded from public view.
The news first came to me in an email from a local photographer, Marg Johnson, who later tracked down a GoFundMe set up by another former Crimora Elementary School student, Sabrina Halterman Brown.
“If all of us from Crimora school come together, we can really make a difference in their lives,” Brown wrote on the GoFundMe page.
Count me in, definitely, because I don’t know where I’d be right now if not for the Dixons and the rest of those amazing teachers at Crimora Elementary, which the county school system closed in the late 1980s, because the school was deemed too small to meet community needs.
I’m all for progress, but Crimora, where I grew up and still think of as home, lost something that it would never get back when it lost that school.
A lot of us kids, back in the day, were trailer-park kids, living in homes that are taxed as personal property, like a car, though our moms and dads paid a lot more for a car than they did for the trailers.
Stuck out in the northeast corner of the county, 20 minutes from the nearest stoplight, 30 minutes from the county library, and remember, for my generation, there was no cable TV, no internet, we had that school, and that was it.
And the Dixons were the First Couple.
Mr. Dixon was the seventh-grade math and social studies teacher, and de facto assistant principal, and he was feared.
This is back in the day when paddling was still a thing in schools.
I don’t know that he actually did paddle kids, but it was out there among the kids – if you’re going to get caught doing something, just hope that Mr. Dixon isn’t the one in the office when it happens.
Between that, and having to memorize and be able to recite the Preamble to the United States Constitution to be able to pass his social studies class, Mr. Dixon was part of the rite of passage for a couple of generations of us kids from Crimora.
I never did go back and tell him that I got a degree in constitutional law from UVA a few years after nervously reciting the Preamble to him.
If Mr. Dixon was the stern dad at Crimora Elementary, Mrs. Dixon was the school mom.
She taught English, and for me, she was the first to recognize that I might have what it takes to be a writer, and encouraged me.
She was also a University of Maryland basketball fan, and think back, this is at the height of the Terry Holland vs. Lefty Driesell years, Ralph Sampson vs. Adrian Branch and Len Bias.
I remember her congratulating me when I won the school spelling bee in seventh grade by telling me that UVA had won its first-round game in the ACC Tournament, because for some reason, the school had scheduled the spelling bee for that particular Friday.
That was the only year that I wasn’t home sick from school so that I could watch.
The Dixons meant a lot to me, and to thousands of kids who grew up in Crimora, and never gave a thought to how much they and our other teachers were sacrificing of themselves to be a guiding force in our lives.
It stands out to me now, all these many years later, what these two incredible people gave up, just in terms of their own financial security.
It’s time for those of us whose lives are better because they were there for us to give some of what they gave to us back.
It won’t begin to repay the debt we owe them, of course.
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Chris Graham
