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Longtime Gulf English teacher Barbara Starkey will retire at the end of the school year. She has taught 9th grade English for most of her career, but has also taught honors English and other grade levels, and she has taught Reading.

Mrs. Starkey has the distinction of being the last Gulf teacher who taught here when the building now housing Gulf High School first opened. That was in September 1971 and the school was actually Gulf Junior High School, with grades 7 to 9, and Mrs. Starkey taught 9th grade English that first year.

She remembers that the entire building, including all of the classrooms, the commons, and the ramp, was carpeted. A central vacuum system was installed so that cleaning the carpet involved only hooking a tube to the vacuum pipe on the wall. The receptacle for the pipe is still on the wall in each classroom in the main building.

When the school first opened, some of the furniture had not arrived. Students sat on the floor in the cafeteria for lunch and, for about a week, teachers sat on sheets of asbestos to eat lunch. No one knew that asbestos was dangerous. Teacher pre-planning week was held at what is now Schwettman Education Center because the new building wasn’t ready.

With the 1971-72 school year about to start, Mrs. Starkey thought she might not be hired as a teacher, but her father-in-law happened to see Fred Marchman, the newly-appointed Assistant Superintendent of Schools, at the post office. He mentioned to Mr. Marchman that his daughter-in-law had applied to be a teacher, and the next day she received a phone call with the news that she was hired. There was no interview. Thomas Weightman was the principal of Gulf Junior High School at the time. She says that if her father-in-law hadn’t seen Mr. Marchman that day, she probably never would have taught at Gulf High School.

She taught at Gulf Junior High School for two years before taking time off to have children.

She returned to Gulf High School in 1988, having been hired in October when an English teacher resigned. That year she taught her own son Rhyan.

Mrs. Starkey claims that the air conditioning has never worked properly in our building. When she started teaching here, her room was freezing but Gladys Pigman’s classroom next door was too hot. She and Mrs. Pigman would visit each other’s rooms to cool off or warm up.

Mrs. Starkey began her teaching career in 1968 as the head of the Foreign Language and English Department at Wakulla High School in Wakulla, Florida. Despite her beginner status, she was made department chair, to the consternation of some of the other teachers, because she held a Master’s degree in English. Wakulla High School was also in a brand-new building when she started teaching there. She taught there for one year.

After teaching at Wakulla, she taught in Atlanta for one year and then took off before coming to Gulf Junior High School in 1971.

Barbara Tormala was born on June 19, 1944. Both of her parents were Finnish-Americans and spoke Finnish at home, although Barbara did not. She graduated from Fort Myers Senior High School in 1962. She earned a Master’s degree in English at FSU and she taught freshman English at FSU for two years under a graduate assistanceship while she was earning her Master’s degree.

Her husband John is a retired Nationwide agent. Their children are Eric, who is now caring for her husband; Rhyan, who works for an alarm system company; Jeff, who has an insurance agency; and Steve, who is hub master for Netflix. She had six grandchildren.

One of her goals for her retirement is to get a close relationship with her grandchildren. She says she may substitute teach after the mandatory one-year waiting period.

She says that during her teaching career, she has categorized her students either as Starkey Stellars, Starkey Stinkers, or Starkey Stoners. The students in the last category apparently never knew they made that category, but the students in the second category were told that she believed that if you put enough pressure on a Starkey Stinker, he or she would eventually become a Starkey Stellar.