Bige Newman shows off part of the stockpile of pencils that he keeps stored in his basement. Newman has spent decades making and selling wooden items, but he also has been donating thousands of pencils to schools in the region for the last 10 years.PENCIL MATH• A standard No. 2 pencil is 7.5 inches long.• A million pencils would equal 7.5 million inches.• That converts to 625,000 feet.• Divide by 5,280, the number of feet in a mile.• Total equals 118.37 miles.
Bige (BYj) Newman grew up in rural, 1940s-era Meigs County, the middle child of his parents’ 11 children.
Pencils were hard to come by for a farming family with so many kids.
“We watched a pencil then,” he said. “You took care of it.”
Now he hands them out by the fistful.