The lessons were not delivered meekly. Students who balked often felt the consequences on their backsides. Titus Hall took a whipping almost every day during his years at Terrell, for smoking, or fighting, or being in the wrong place in the halls at the wrong time, or some other behavior that transgressed the Terrell High code. Sometimes Mrs. Bates would tan his behind herself, or sometimes it was Mrs. Peace. Occasionally, they sent him down to Marion Bates, the burly coach, a former All-American lineman at Prairie View A&M University, who would pull out his leather strap for more vigorous punishment. Hall never forgot the pain of that strap, the meat of his backside being sucked up into the holes in the leather.

But eventually, the point of those whippings took. Hall began to buy into notions of dignity, respect, perseverance and hope as the means to a good life. One day in church during his high school years, Hall saw the son of Terrell's principal show up for services in his Air Force uniform, wings sparkling from his collar. Hall fell in love with that uniform, and his future was decided in that moment.

He went on to be mentored by one of the famous Tuskegee Airmen, then started a rapid rise in the Air Force. In 1961, during the Cuban missile crisis, Hall lived in his B-47 bomber on an airstrip in Arizona, poised to take off and deliver nuclear weapons to one of the Strategic Air Command's most important targets. He later made technical presentations to the secretary of Defense. He commanded 28,000 men and women at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. And for the rest of his life, he could not go to the grocery store without putting on a necktie first.

Just like his teachers at Terrell.

Retired Air Force major general or not, on that recent afternoon in May, Titus Hall nearly had his backside blistered by Hazel Harvey Peace one more time. Hall is a large, gregarious man with a booming voice and laugh, the sort prone to falling into long, impassioned conversations with strangers in hotel lobbies. That day in May, he was so busy getting reacquainted with an old friend on the south side, laughing and talking on the friend's front porch, that he forgot about Mrs. Peace waiting for him in the back seat of his car.

Finally, she had enough.

"Titus, I'll take after your bottom," she muttered to herself, opening the car door and charging up the sidewalk, a tiny woman with her gray hair in a bun, a yellow shawl pulled over her shoulders despite the warm afternoon. Mrs. Peace is in her mid-90s, and hadn't taught in decades. Maj. Gen. Titus Hall had consorted with American presidents. But on that day in May, Mrs. Peace was still the dean and he still her student. When Hall saw her coming, a look of fear crossed his face. In that instant, he was a sheepish teen-ager again, stepping from the porch and walking hurriedly in her direction.

"You've still got that look in your eyes," Hall said when he reached her, hugging her and laughing. "God bless you. You've still got that look."

He was indeed delighted to see Mrs. Peace looking so well, filled with that same old fire, because so much else had changed. During their visit to Fort Worth, Titus and Clarissa Hall had spent hours in the car traversing the city, finding that the Negro business district where Hall delivered ice cream and whiskey for a pharmacist was now a huge parking lot. Greenway Park, where blacks played softball and ate barbecue on Juneteenth, was forgotten beneath a freeway. The north side meatpacking plants where Hall's mother had cleaned chitlins for 25 cents an hour were now abandoned hulks.

But Mrs. Peace was the same, still fit enough to patrol the high school halls and strike terror into any teen-age boy with just a look and the simple admonition, "Young man!" She was a living Fort Worth legend now, with a wing of the Fort Worth Public Library recently named for her. Last winter, Peace and famous Fort Worth entrepreneur Ed Bass shared the honor of hefting the Olympic Torch through downtown on its way to the Winter Games in Salt Lake City.

That afternoon in May, she was dwarfed by Hall as the two sat together on her living room sofa. Mrs. Peace said she remembered him as a short, bright youngster who was always into something, for good or ill. Did she ever think he would become a high-ranking military officer? No, she said, and Hall laughed loudly.

That he had done so made her heart "leap for joy." But then she felt that pride about so many of her students, thousands of them, and not just the generals, doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, entertainers and educators who had led noteworthy lives after Terrell.

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Photo Credit for Bearden Elementary: Maude Schuyler Clay
Photo Credit for Walton Elementary: Chris Hamilton