Retired Eutawville teacher sees much change in 100 years

EUTAWVILLE, S.C. (AP) - From coaching the Eutawville High School girls’ basketball team to decades of teaching and church involvement, Eliza Spiers Couturier has had experiences of a lifetime while enjoying small-town living.

“It’s something I didn’t think would ever happen. I’m amazed by it all and I feel greatly blessed,” said the soft-spoken Couturier from a rocking chair on the porch of her historic home, Lawson’s Pond, in the Cross community.

On April 16, she turned 100.

“Most of my life, I have enjoyed good health,” she said.

In recent years, she’d taken a couple of falls that resulted in breaking both of her hips and undergoing physical rehabilitation.

“But I’m not in any pain. I feel absolutely blessed,” she said.

“All I can say is the Good Lord has blessed me. But I will say this, I think I have led what you might call a ‘clean life,’” she said.

“I was raised on the farm. I ate healthy, homegrown food. I did not smoke. I did not drink. And all in all, I have taken good care of myself,” she said.

She’s been receiving birthday cards over the past weeks and several of former students, from her 37-year teaching career, have sent cards to her. Her first four years of teaching were at the Eutawville School and the remaining 33 were at Cross Elementary School.

She taught first and second grades.

After graduating from Winthrop College, now Winthrop University, in 1942, Couturier got a job teaching at the Eutawville School, which housed first through 11th grades. This was before kindergarten and the 12th grades were required for public schools.

Her starting salary? $85 monthly, but not during the summer when school was out.

After four years, she began teaching at Cross Elementary School, where her salary increased to $100 monthly.

Couturier said she was the youngest faculty member at the school in Eutawville and the principal saw that as an opportunity to ask her to coach the girls’ basketball team.

She said the principal handed her the rule book.

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” she said with a quiet laugh.

In high school, Couturier said she played basketball when she was a student at Cross High School, but her weak ankles didn’t tolerate the terrain of the outdoor basketball court, which prevented her from playing often.

One season when she coached at Eutawville, the team defeated Providence High School, she said.

“The only team we could not beat was Bowman,” she added.

“When I went to Cross to teach, I kept the scorebook for the basketball team there and Cross beat Bowman. I thought, ‘At last!’” she said, still beaming about the victory.

But being a teacher and coach at a small-town high school during World War II had its shares of challenges.

“Gas was rationed, tires were rationed,” she said.

She was also responsible for personally transporting the six-member basketball team to and from games.

Tom Wiggins, who ran a filling station in Eutawville, made sure Couturier’s tires and gas were in good shape during her travels for games.

“I’ll always remember him for that,” she said.

She said he didn’t always charge her for the gas she used.

On one occasion, she used a borrowed vehicle to take herself, five players and one substitute to Springfield for a game.

The main trouble? The straight-shift vehicle wouldn’t stay in gear.

That’s when she asked one of the players to drive while she sat in the center and held the gear shift to and from the game.

“And I didn’t have any anxiety about that,” she said, “I just knew it was OK, but that was an experience.”

Her lessons to impressionable first and second-graders weren’t limited to the classroom.

“If they spilled anything in the lunchroom, they had to go to the kitchen and get a wet towel and clean it up,” she said of her former students. “They didn’t leave it for the lunchroom ladies to clean up.”

She taught her students that school was their home away from home, she said, and to clean up the classroom each day.

“I taught them respect and table manners,” she added.

She also loved reading poetry to them, especially poems by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Just before 1980, she retired from teaching.

Her husband passed away less than two years before.

Couturier decided to dedicate her time to doing God’s work at the Church of the Epiphany, the historic Episcopal church in Eutawville.

“The years with the church were very rewarding,” she said, “it was a nice way to spend my retirement.”

“I learned a lot. The best way to learn a lot is to get in there and work with the situation,” she said.

“I became more spiritual by being there,” she said.

“Sometimes I sit and just ponder and I’m really overwhelmed with my faith in the Lord Jesus. When you really think about it all, it’s overwhelming,” she said.

During her years of active church work, she became the first woman to serve on the church’s vestry.

She said one of the church’s leaders asked her to run as an applicant for the vestry.

“It’s time we had a woman on the vestry,” Couturier said the church leader told her.

She served two terms.

She served on numerous church committees, including as chairman for the Altar Guild for 20 years, but service on it for 50 years.

She wrote an altar guild manual to aid others who serve on it.

“When I touched the linen, I thought of the linen that was wrapped around Jesus’s body when he was put in the tomb,” she said.

“We have a piece of linen that we call the ‘corporal’ during the communion service and it is supposed to represent the headpiece that was used on Jesus’s head,” she said.

“Those are the kinds of things that just really get you,” she added.

In 2009, Couturier was chosen as the South Carolina Episcopal Church Women’s Most Honored Woman of the Year.

But if one were to ask Couturier about getting public praise about her dedicated church work, she’d say, “You’re working for the Lord and you’re not working for recognition.”

She prefers working behind the scenes and out of the spotlight, she said.

Couturier experienced many changes over the past century – from her childhood of watching grownups huddled around a radio producing static competing with the voice of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to purchasing a computer in recent years – well into her 80s and 90s.

“The biggest problem with aging,” she said, “is accepting change with grace, but there’s nothing I can do about it and there have been changes all along the way.”

The centenarian said she’ll continue “coaching,” just as she did in her younger years, except this time, she’s “coaching” Clemson basketball from her easy chair at home.

She was married to the late Elias Francis Couturier and they are parents to two daughters: Mary Elizabeth Couturier Ellis and Martha McKelvey Couturier DuPree.

The couple also has three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.