ALUMNI
Headmaster GEORGE KIRKPATRICK, Tinsley and her typewriter worked tirelessly at the business of school, helping the fledgling institution find its way.
Saluting
Sally Tinsley A BELOVED QUEEN OF THE CASTLE
F
or parents and students, the start of a new academic year brings back-to-school shopping and earlier bedtimes, but for many school employees, August’s activities mark the end of months of preparation—work that begins long before the previous school year ends. Since Pace Academy’s founding in 1958, the school’s iconic Castle, now Kirkpatrick Hall, has served as the hub of summertime activity. There, faculty and staff collect calendar dates and plan events; they piece together student and teacher schedules, order textbooks and supplies, reconcile
54
KnightTimes | Fall 2016
budgets, pay bills and update records; they oversee campus upgrades, put in place new policies and communicate with families to ensure a smooth start. In the end, those million tiny tasks make the true magic of the first day of school possible, and each year Pace’s doors open to welcome students once again. For two decades, SALLY TINSLEY was at the center of pre-school preparations; she controlled the Castle from behind the scenes. As secretary to Pace’s first headmaster, FRANK KALEY, and then to Upper School Principal BOB CHAMBERS and
To tell Sally Tinsley’s Pace story, one must start in 1943 at a Middle Tennessee State University dance, where she met MEL TINSLEY, a young cadet with the 48th Tank Battalion. “He waited until the last song to ask me to dance,” Sally recalls. “It was a jitterbug number. He broke in and said he didn’t jitterbug. We danced anyway, and I gave him my phone number. We had our first date the next night.” Less than a year later, Sally and Mel married; he landed in Marseilles two months after their wedding, and Sally’s first letter to France included news that she was expecting. Mel fought in the Battle of the Bulge and was there soon after U.S. forces liberated Dachau concentration camp in 1945. He met his daughter, NENA TINSLEY ALLEN, when she was six months old. After World War II, the Tinsleys settled in Lexington, Ky., where Mel earned a master’s degree in metallurgical engineering at the University of Kentucky. There they welcomed a second daughter, LAURA TINSLEY MCFAYDEN ’67. A job at Lockheed Martin brought the family to Atlanta in 1958, and in 1960, Laura enrolled at a new school named Pace Academy. The Tinsleys came to know Frank Kaley through the admissions process, and when Laura was accepted to Pace, Sally asked Kaley if she might work at the school to pay Laura’s tuition. Kaley, in need of additional administrative assistance, gratefully accepted the offer, and Sally set up shop at a makeshift table in the Castle kitchen. “At that time, the school was just the Castle, surrounded by the most magnificent terraced gardens,” McFayden remembers. The building, once a private home, lent itself to an immediate feeling of closeness between members of the Pace community and an all-hands-on-deck mentality among faculty and staff. Regardless of titles or responsibilities, everyone did whatever was necessary to keep the young school afloat— Tinsley in particular.