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Miss Connie Ferrington, Mary Lou Merrill.<\/p><\/div>\n
Connie Fearington\u00a0Brosi was born on June 23, 1943, to\u00a0William and Sylvia Fearington. She\u00a0and her three sisters grew\u00a0up in rural southeastern Illinois. They spent their childhood helping farm with horses alongside their\u00a0father and grandfather, who was from Laurel County, Kentucky.\u00a0Connie played piano at church and was active in 4-H. During her high school years, she received a Betty Crocker Future Homemaker of the Year award.<\/p>\n
Connie’s education at Eastern Illinois University was funded by a scholarship offered to top students planning to become teachers. The scholarship program was instituted to offset a teaching shortage at that time.<\/p>\n
After graduating in 1965, Connie was hired by the\u00a0Pine Mountain Settlement School as a teacher. Her influence at the School\u00a0is\u00a0described at\u00a0the\u00a0Appalachian Mountain Books<\/span> website:<\/p>\n [S]he introduced her students to regional books which many of them came to love. One of several regional authors she met while there was Rebecca Caudill who was born nearby and visited the school often. Her book, <\/em>Did You Carry the Flag Today, Charlie, was about one of Connie’s students.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n In 1968 she moved to Nashville and taught first grade in a segregated school, Wharton Elementary. While teaching, Connie took night classes and earned a Master\u2019s Degree in Elementary Education from Peabody College in Nashville.<\/p>\n After Connie married George Brosi\u00a0at Pickett State Park, Tennessee, in 1971, the couple lived on a small\u00a0farm near\u00a0Sequatchie,\u00a0Tennessee (near where she is now buried). In 1979 George and Connie were hired by the Council of the Southern Mountains to work at their Appalachian Book and Record Shop in Berea, Kentucky, a store which specialized in new books and records about the Mountain South.\u00a0Feeling that many of the most important regional books were out-of-print and not available in a store that only sold new merchandise, Connie and George established their own family book business in 1982, Appalachian Mountain Books.<\/p>\n Connie was George\u2019s partner in several other\u00a0professional endeavors as well, including his work for social justice organizations and later his work as editor of Appalachian Heritage,\u00a0<\/em>a literary quarterly published by\u00a0Berea College.<\/p>\n Connie was a hard-working homemaker and mother whose days were filled with cooking from scratch and raising her seven children: Brook, Berry,\u00a0Blossom, Sunshine, Sky, Glade, and Eagle. (Sky eventually\u00a0married\u00a0Geoff Marietta. After both\u00a0earned\u00a0their doctorate degrees, Sky and Geoff\u00a0moved their family, which\u00a0by then\u00a0included two sons, Perry and Harlan,\u00a0to Pine Mountain Settlement School in 2015 where Geoff began serving\u00a0as director of the School and Sky as ________.)<\/p>\n According to Connie’s obituary,<\/p>\n Connie eschewed materialism, questioned conformity, and embraced simple living. She lived her life with little money, and her specialty was making-do. She heated her home with wood, dried her laundry in the sun, and raised much of her own food. Connie\u2019s home featured kids and dogs playing in the yard, [crowing roosters], and a supper table laden with garden food, homemade rolls, and, if you were lucky, her legendary blackberry pie.<\/em><\/p>\n As Connie’s\u00a0children grew, her role shifted from Mama to Mamaw to her thirteen grandchildren. Her obituary concluded\u00a0with this observation:\u00a0“All young people were important to Connie and through them her values live on.”<\/p>\n Connie Carol Fearington Brosi passed away at the age of 72 on June 27, 2015, in her home surrounded by family following a long battle with cancer.\u00a0She was buried at the Forever Wild Cemetery near Whitwell, Tennessee.\u00a0A\u00a0memorial service\u00a0was held on\u00a0on Sunday, July 19, 2015, at Pine Mountain Settlement School and the Connie Brosi Memorial Fund was established at the\u00a0School.<\/p>\n — Adapted from an obituary notice for Mrs. Brosi posted July 2015 on Facebook by George Brosi GALLERY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\t\t
\n<\/i>and from the\u00a0Appalachian Mountain Books website.<\/i><\/p>\n
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