< Previous page

Kelly lives in a two-story white house just down U.S. 301 from the club on Ricks Road, named for her father's family. Four generations of Rickses have been raised in the home, she says.

She earned her teaching degree at what was then Campbell College, where she also met her husband, Roy Kelly.

She spent most of her long career teaching for a few years in a row at different schools, taking breaks when her children were born. Later she would pick up short-term assignments. It was one of those, at Selma Elementary School, that planted the seed for the club in her mind. Kelly says she looked at the smiles and enthusiasm of those students and wondered why so many had lost their zeal for learning -- and their futures -- by middle school.

"Those kids were so excited," Kelly says. "By middle school, that light was not there. How do they lose that between kindergarten and sixth grade?"

About the same time, she asked a tenant about two former students of hers who were close friends. One of them, whom she knew as a playful but smart middle-school boy, was in prison for killing his friend.

"These were children who showed a lot of promise," she says. "There was no reason they couldn't go to college."

Snowball effect

Kelly, who admits being prone to procrastination, said she hit on the idea of the club long before she acted on it: "You know, you can't start something like this until all the closets are clean," she says, with a self-mocking laugh.

Finally, she called Town Councilwoman Jacqueline Lacy. The pair met that afternoon, and the next day visited the Boys & Girls Club in Mount Olive.

Over the coming year, Kelly would visit clubs in Florida, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia -- anywhere she found herself traveling -- to see what it would take to start one in Selma. She also started talking up the project with people she knew around town, and donations of time and money started pouring in.

What Kelly jokingly calls the only major project she had undertaken since motherhood came together quickly. With a board of directors intact, the group raised more than $200,000 in less than a year, and the club opened the next fall.

"Once I uttered the words out loud, it took off," she says. "It was that snowball effect."

< Previous page