Voices echoed along Penn Manor High School's hallways Friday. Students buzzed about the football team's upcoming playoff game or grumbled about weekend assignments.

In my imagination, I heard a disciplinary voice among the noisy crowd, ordering students to cease loitering, to tie their shoes, to knock off the kissing.

I visualized a bouncing pouf of light brown hair just over the students' shoulders and then pictured the source of the killjoy message coming into view — the ghost of a short woman like a cannonball on fire barreling through the middle of the crowded hallway.

My dear Dr. Diane Meily, I whispered, and then the specter vanished, escaping back to where I store mental keepsakes from my past.

I went to Penn Manor, my alma mater, Friday to speak about my experiences covering the 2008 election. As I talked before three classes, however, I came to understand how this day was about talking to Dr. Meily, or at least her memory, like a senior delivering an oral report.

Dr. Diane Meily Blount (known as Dr. Meily to her students) taught world history at Penn Manor, her alma mater, for 18 years until in 2004 ovarian cancer proved to be the only thing in this world she couldn't successfully defeat.

"She wanted every student to know just how far they could take their abilities, and if they disciplined themselves they could rise beyond what they thought they could do," said Dr. Meily's longtime friend, Donna Brady, a social-studies teacher at Penn Manor.

Dr. Meily's methods could cause angst as much as inspiration. Barely 5 feet tall, she rose above her stature with a boisterous, animated personality. She could be hell in a pair of pointy blue Dutch clogs. She cracked down on unruly students, but was hardest on those in whom she saw the greatest potential.

"Some students were scared of her at first," Brady said. "Many people found her, at first, challenging, maybe a little intimidating. They knew they would have to put out their best in her class, and that gave kids pause."

During elementary school, I strove for straight A's, but by high school, I'd grown overconfident and lazy. I relied on natural ability to score B's and be satisfied.

Dr. Meily wouldn't forgive me for taking an easy road, and when she finally ensnared me in one of her classes during my senior year, failure was not an option, yet success would not be easily obtained. Like others who consider her a mentor, I realized the more she challenged you the more it was just her brand of tough love.

As much as she was a stickler, she could be a rabble-rouser, too. Dr. Meily was the vicious hall monitor snapping at every minor infraction, but one day she told me she did this because the administration made her work the hallways, an activity she detested, and so to get back at them, she flooded the office with students who had committed inane offenses, such as leaving their shoelaces untied.

And her laugh — she had a giggling, full-bodied laugh that would make her hairdo shake. It served as evidence that behind the fire-breathing exterior was a woman whose soul wasn't half-full or half-empty but running over.

Doctors discovered cancer in Dr. Meily in 2002. But even the prospect of having to fight a fatal disease and the real possibility of death did not intimidate her.

"She treated it almost like a science problem - like, 'OK, this is what the situation is, and this is how I'm going to approach it, and I'm going to do the most aggressive treatment I can,' " Brady said.

Surgery and chemotherapy helped for a while. When she became weaker, she had to cross the massive Penn Manor campus in a wheelchair, a device in which Dr. Meily, with all her vigor, never felt comfortable, according to Brady.

Her health deteriorated, and the cancer returned. Brady said she phoned Dr. Meily at the hospital on her friend's 49th birthday. It was that day on which a mentor to hundreds if not thousands of Penn Manor kids learned her cancer was terminal.

Dr. Meily died in the spring of 2004.

"She wanted to make the most out of every minute, out of every opportunity and every student she met," Brady said. "It was uncompromising."

Dr. Meily is the stern voice of my conscience challenging me, whenever I become satisfied, to do more and to be more. No easy pathways. To be the best writer, you want the toughest editor dicing your material. That's the Dr. Meily way.

If politics shapes our our world, then Dr. Meily would want me to be a journalist living in the middle of it and contributing even a small measure to the great dialogue of our community, state and nation.

My dear Dr. Diane Meily.

E-mail: dpidgeon@lnpnews.com