Anita Myers

Anita (Brown) Myers left us on Tuesday, November 10, 2026. Anita was devoted to her family, friends, and to the idea of helping others through teaching, charity, and her church. She will be missed.

Anita was born shortly after her twin sister, Annette Brown Dunn, on July 19, 1929, at Baptist Hospital in Pensacola, Florida, to Annie and Charles Brown. From their earliest moments, they were known as Sister and Baby.

And the names stuck. When she entered the first grade, the teacher asked Anita who she was. She proudly replied, “I’m Baby Brown.” Although that was the day she learned her first name, she is still called Baby by many of the children and grandchildren of lifelong friends.

In turn, she acquired the practice of nicknaming those close to her. Almost everyone she liked was “Shug” at one point or another.

Raised between Pensacola and Flomaton, Alabama, during the Depression, Anita spent a lot of time on their farm with her great aunt and uncle Jenny and Allen Holt, whom she considered her grandparents. She also forged the first of her many lasting friendships there.

Anita graduated from high school in Pensacola, but Flomaton was where her career began. She got a summer job teaching typing skills to former classmates. That fall Anita enrolled at Alabama College for Women (now the University of Montevallo) where she intended to get a degree in Commercial Sciences. Her original intention was to instruct high school students in clerical and accounting skills.

However, between her sophomore and junior years, those intentions pivoted. Financial concerns intervened, causing Anita to put her studies on hold. However, she got real experience when she accepted a position teaching first graders at Flomaton Elementary School.

She was more than a bit surprised when she discovered there were 50 children in the class. But she rose to the challenge. As Anita put it, “We had a wonderful year. I loved them, played with them, read to them and even tried to keep them warm.”

Anita particularly recalled having to haul logs from a shed to the classroom on cold winter mornings, hoping that an old wood heater would do its job before the children arrived. This must have been truly hard for someone known to be “chilly” during the height of a Pensacola summer.

Those students had a profound influence on Anita’s life. When she returned to college, she immediately changed her major to Elementary Education. And more than that, she graduated in just three years, alongside her twin and their friends.

After college, Anita returned to Pensacola. She got her first postgraduate position at EJ Wilson School. A year or two later, she transferred to OJ Semmes, where she spent the majority of her career. The first 28 years she taught first graders. After that she became a school-based reading instructor where she not only guided the curriculum for OJ Semmes, but also offered guidance for county-wide program changes.

There are Baby Boomers through Millennials who credit Miss Brown, or Mrs. Myers, as she was later known, with teaching them to read and write. It was especially important to her that children had that foundation, because she had difficulty sounding out words as a child.

She must have been successful in her efforts because she was nominated by the entire OJ Semmes faculty for the Escambia County Teacher of the Year award in 1985. “We often laugh and say she could teach a log to read,” remarked one of her advocates.

Anita married Thomas Oscar Myers in 1973 and became stepmother to his two children, JoLynn(Jim) Bostik and David (Joyce) Myers. Anita and Tom welcomed grandchildren and great-grandchildren during the 42 years they enjoyed together prior to his death in 2015.

Over the course of her retirement, Anita spent time with her greatly loved friends playing bridge, shopping, or going to lunch. She also volunteered as an adult literacy teacher and traveled the country with Tom. Most of their trips were with the First Baptist Church of Pensacola Leisure Timers. She also became a more active member of the First Baptist Church, which was an important part of her life from months after her birth.

Anita will be missed by all those who loved her, including her nieces Carol Ann Dunn and Diane (Lloyd) Boyle, her great-niece Annette Arceneaux (Aaron Chotikul) and her brother-in-law, Robert Dunn.

Given her great love for her family, friends, and church, we trust Anita is now happily reunited with them.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made in Anita’s name to the Alzheimer’s Association (https://www.alz.org)

Funeral services will be held at Bayview Memorial Park on Tuesday, November 17, 2026.