It’s a safe bet that the graduates who return for the Class of 1958 reunion at Murray State in May won’t remember having Ruth Wiman Tucker as one of their teachers.

That’s because the silver-haired senior is one of their classmates.

The Mayfield resident, who just celebrated her 95 th birthday, enrolled at Murray State Teacher’s College four days after graduating from high school in 1930. “I paid $20 a month for room and board,” she said. “Can you believe it?”

She returned home after three months because her mother got sick, but the determined young woman re-enrolled in 1932 and completed enough hours to begin teaching at the old Dublin School in Graves County . She continued taking courses at Murray State every summer, graduating 28 years later with a bachelor’s degree in elementary education.

Tucker fondly remembers those first three months at MSTC.

“There were 1,200 students enrolled and the teachers knew us by name,” she said. “(College president) Rainey T. Wells was a down to earth man who would chat with students.”

The students on campus were also close-knit, she said, adding that she and some of her freshmen classmates were befriended by four seniors, including Forrest Pogue, who Tucker described as “a brilliant student and one of the smartest people I ever knew.” Pogue graduated in 1931 and became a renowned WWII historian and distinguished alumnus of the university.

“He and his friends adopted us,” Tucker said. “They always looked after us, even when we were in the cafeteria.”

Forms returned by several ’58 grads, most of whom lived on campus, indicate they also have fond memories of close friendships, caring professors, events such as Homecoming and Campus Lights, and the student hangout, The Hut.

Tucker’s favorite Murray State memory involved a prank she and a friend pulled on two unsuspecting college lovebirds during the first month she lived in the women’s dorm, Wells Hall.

“Harry Lee Waterfield and Laura ( Ferguson ) were courting on the steps below us and Anna and I thought we would have some fun,” she said “We got a jar of pickles and dipped a pickle in the juice, then we stuck the pickle out the window and dripped the juice on them.”

Why drip pickle juice on the couple?

“Because they were out past the 10 p.m. curfew,” she said, laughing. “They’d look up at the sky and all around, but they never did see us.”

Waterfield and Ferguson later married and had three children. Their son, Harry Lee Jr., is a member of the MSU Foundation board of trustees. “I heard a lot of stories about my parents’ days at MSU but this is one I had not heard,” he wrote in an email to the alumni office. “Our parents probably didn’t want to let us know they ever missed a curfew – even if it was 10 p.m. ”

Tucker received a lifetime teaching certificate after earning 64 hours, but continued taking classes at Murray State every summer. “I loved teaching,” she said, “and I wanted to get that degree.”

Diplomas were conferred on the 1958 graduates at an evening ceremony on June 2 in the College Auditorium. Now called Lovett Auditorium, the facility was not air-conditioned then. Tucker and several hundred graduates, all wearing the traditional black cap and gown, crossed the stage one-by-one as each name was called.

“It was a sunny, hot day,” she said. “Oh, boy, was it hot. I was about the third from the last person to get a degree, but nobody passed out.”

Tucker taught public school for 37 years, including a year at a one-room school in Golo. She briefly left teaching to manage a Sears office but returned to the classroom, retiring from Washington Elementary, now Sparks Elementary. The school is named after Don Sparks, a 1958 Murray State graduate and former chairman of the MSU board of regents.

She didn’t know Sparks or his wife, the former Carolyn Lowe, also a ’58 grad, while they were students. She knows ’58 grad Robert Sullivan only through their affiliation with the First Baptist Church of Mayfield where Tucker, a charter member of MSU’s Baptist Student Union, taught Sunday School for 55 years. Another ’58 graduate, Bill Sullivan, of Lakeland , Tenn. , married Tucker’s niece, Shirley Wiman, who graduated from Murray State in 1957.

Tucker, who hasn’t been on the campus in 30 years, will attend all of the reunion events on Friday and the Commencement ceremony Saturday during which the class will receive special recognition. She said attending the reunion will be an honor.

“I just hope I see people that I knew then,” Tucker said, “but I usually have a good time wherever I go.”