Margarette Sather said, “The humanities feed the soul. They enlarge the heart.” We five alumni from the class of 1966 collaborated to nominate our teacher, Margarette Sather, for the Waggener Hall of Fame because of the extraordinary and enduring impact she had on us and other classmates.
Her Humanities course covered art, music, philosophy, and religion. In addition to classroom work, she required her students to attend concerts, opera, ballet and live theater.
Thanks at least in part to this exposure, all five of us have continued to patronize or participate in the arts throughout our adult lives. Some of us are Louisville Orchestra subscribers. Some regularly attend local theater productions, and one of us was president of Louisville Bunbury Theatre for seven years. Some of us went on to take art history courses in college and still visit art museums and exhibits. Two of us are active
musicians. She inspired one of us to major in philosophy. And two of us — plus several other of her students that we’re aware of — were introduced to Buddhism in her class and ended up following a Buddhist path.
In all these ways, Margarette Sather influenced and enriched our lives forever, decades beyond graduation.
We don’t recall her ever mentioning it in the classroom, but from our research for this nomination we learned that she was active in civil rights work. She knew Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And she participated in the “Bloody Sunday” march that attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma AL, a pivotal incident in civil rights history that happened six months before we entered her class. This alone arguably qualifies Margarette Sather for Waggener’s Hall of Fame.
Nominated by:
Dick Bay, Rob Steiner, Leslie Lawson, Gary Luhr, Jan Dawson, Danny Marshall
(Waggener High School class of 1966)
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