MUSCATINE, Iowa – It took nearly two-thirds of her life for Mary Beth Carey to finish sixth grade.

But after 37 years of teaching sixth-graders in Muscatine, including the past 25 as a reading teacher at West Middle School, Carey, 58, is graduating to new challenges. Jim Carey, 74, the retired Iowa Department of Transportation inspector whom she married in 1971, needs her more than her students do.

Carey, known by her colleagues and many of her students as “MBC,” has enrolled at Muscatine Community College, where she plans to become a certified nursing assistant. She’ll put the training to use, she says, helping care for her husband, who has Parkinson’s disease and dementia, along with the broken hip he suffered when he fell in January. Since the fall, he has been living at a care facility in Muscatine, and it’s not certain when he might get to return home.

Her husband and the other adults she may care for as a CNA will

become her new students, Carey said, receiving the kind of one-on-one attention her sixth-graders have grown accustomed to through the years.

“There used to be a time I’d take them home with me,” Carey, who lives in Columbus Junction, said of her students. They became surrogates for the children of their own that the Careys never had.

“I connect” to them, she said. “I’m like a magnet.”

In 1971, when she was still Mary Beth Bonnichsen, Carey graduated after just three years at Iowa Wesleyan College in Mount Pleasant.

Muscatine and many other school districts four decades ago often wouldn’t hire young female teachers who planned to get married, Carey said. So, without telling anyone she was engaged, she signed a contract to teach at the old Lincoln Elementary School. She also taught at Washington Elementary School before moving to West Middle School.

It’s her classroom at West that is filled with stuff accumulated over 25 years. There’s the old department-store clothes rack and the fur coat that hangs from it and the bobblehead doll on Carey’s desk of Garry Gulash, a defenseman for the Quad-City Mallards from 1998 through 2001. The counters are stacked with books, papers and other odds and ends collected by the self-proclaimed “Queen of Stuff.” Posters of Martin Luther King Jr. and Albert Einstein peer down from the walls.

To help teach the lesson of the day in her last class period on a recent Thursday, Carey grabbed an old orange stocking hat — a purchase, she said, from Goodwill. It was a prop to go with the short story, “Eleven,” by Sandra Cisneros, a Chicana from Chicago who has a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

The challenge for Carey’s students: Identify the 13 similes (sentences that make a comparison by using the word “like” or “as”) in the story by Cisneros.

“This is pretty par for the course,” Carey said as she interacted with her students.

Carey says she started teaching as a 4-year-old, riding with her then-3-year-old brother, Steven, in the backseat of the Bonnichsens’ 1955 Chevrolet. “I can’t shut it off,” she said. “Teaching school is my life.”

But it’s time to retire, she said with a laugh, before her students are the grandchildren of her first students. As it is, in many of her classes she teaches at least a few of her former students’ children.

“You know my favorite word? It’s fun,” she said. “They (wouldn’t) be paying me if they knew how much fun I have.”

Editor’s note: This story is one in a month-long series the Muscatine Journal is printing in March. The stories will focus on local people, groups and businesses that have overcome economic obstacles and other personal adversity to help make the community better and create better lives for themselves and those around them.

What a ride

What: Retirement party for Mary Beth Carey, who has taught in the Muscatine School District for 37 years.

When: 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Saturday, April 25.

Where: Riverview Center on the Muscatine riverfront.

If you have stories about Carey and pictures for a memory book and video, please send them to:

Sue Johannsen

West Middle School

600 W. Kindler Ave.

Muscatine, Iowa 52761

or by e-mail at:

skjohann@muscatine.k12.ia.us