The reading room

Everyone said the room, with its lobster bisque walls and soft brown leather chairs, looked like Imogene.

Soft elevator jazz hummed from a small portable CD player while Imogene Freer’s family, friends and coworkers inspected Odessa College’s Dr. Imogene Freer Reading Lab, which opened Monday morning.

“This is a dream come true. (Imogene) would have loved this,” retired reading instructor Mona Sandlin said.

Freer loved to travel, so the room is dotted with pictures and mementos from her trips. Framed photographs show her waving from a camel’s back or staggering up the stairs of the Great Wall. The book shelves are filled with glossy travel books, and the curio cabinet beneath her portrait holds odds and ends from her travels including a set of tiny babushka dolls, foreign coins and a pair of small brightly painted wooden clogs.

Freer started out as a reading student at Odessa College in 1956. Already a teacher at San Jacinto Elementary, she began teaching an evening reading class and founded the OC reading department in 1958, according to a biography distributed at the ceremony.

Described by her husband as a lifelong reader and learner, she worked hard to make sure that anyone who wanted to learn to read or to improve their reading skills would have the opportunity, Sherman Freer said. After Imogene Freer’s death, he donated $50,000 to OC to establish a reading room in her memory.

“I was married to that girl about 60 years, so establishing this room for her was the least I could do,” he said.

The selected space, on the third floor of the college library, used to be a white walled classroom. The reading department, overseen by Courtney Wardlaw, executive director of resource development and the Odessa College fund, worked together to renovate the room.

Wardlaw said more than $10,000 was invested in the renovations. The rest of the donation has been put in an endowment earmarked to keep the room in the gleaming condition it is in today.

The reading lab will keep the same hours as the OC reading department, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Thursday, and students looking for a place to work with reading tutors, to hone their reading skills or just to study are welcome to use the room, OC officials said.

“Reading is fundamental. It’s the core of what we do. If you can’t read you can’t do anything, almost, and that’s why we appreciate what Imogene Freer did,” OC president Gregory Williams said.