At two months short of 102 years of age, Sally Mauck lived a long, good life. Born in Itta Bena, MS, in 1913, she grew up in a close knit small town, outliving all her peer friends and relatives. She remembered going down to the town park in Itta Bena as a child and hearing stories told by elderly Civil War veterans. She graduated from McKendree College in Lebanon, IL, meeting there her husband, a "yankee," Paul Mauck. Her first job was teaching Latin to mostly German speaking students in Breese, IL, something of a challenge she would always recall with a rueful smile. Widowed in her early 40's, she taught Spanish at Lee High for a few years before being recruited to teach in Nyack, NY. She reveled in the excitement of all the cultural offerings of New York City, intrepidly driving into the city to lectures at the Metropolitan Museum, concerts, plays, and other events. She taught in New York until her retirement in 1978. Sally had adventure in her blood. She always had a toothbrush and her passport in her purse, just in case any opportunity for travel might arise. She figured anything else she needed she could get along the way. She travelled the world, early on defying convention by travelling alone or with a woman friend, riding donkeys from Honduras to the Panama Canal, and later driving behind the bulldozers building the Pan American Highway through Mexico and Central America in the 1930's. She accompanied her brother on several of his business trips throughout China, and enjoyed additional trips to Japan, South America and Europe, landing on all but one continent. Sally was an amazing storyteller, evoking times and places in vivid detail. She never seemed to forget anything, including Shakespearean sonnets she memorized in junior high school, and long epic poems, including the whole of Longfellow's "Evangelline." She was fully engaged in the world about her, with a keen interest in current events and politics. In her 90's she joined the digital world so she could get online to read the newspapers from Mexico City and Madrid, along with the Wall Street Journal she got in the mail daily. Columbus citizens will recall that she said exactly what she thought in numerous letters to the editor. Sally Mauck is survived by her daughters Marchita Mauck of Baton Rouge, LA; Paula Miller of Douglasville GA; and son Eddie Mauck and wife Janice of Columbus. Her grandchildren include grandson Robert Bradford Mauck and wife Jodie, and their sons Winston and Jameson of Columbus, MS; and her granddaughter Amanda Marie and husband Dr. Chad Tubbs of Atlanta, GA. She was preceded in death by her parents Tenna Castle and Calvin Pendall Bradford, her brother William Bradford and his wife, Edith, her niece Barbara Knowlen, and her beloved husband Paul. Sally was much loved and will be greatly missed. The family is especially grateful to the amazing caretakers over the past two and a half years who treated her as their own mother.
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