KANNAPOLIS — It started back when her youngest son, Neal, didn’t want to stay in Sunday school by himself.

To allay his fears, Annie Lee Wilkinson remained in the toddlers’ room with the teacher, and somehow it became a habit.

Every Sunday school, Annie Lee would stay with the 2-, 3- and 4-year-olds, even after Neal aged out and moved up the ladder. She read books, sang songs, played games.

“I used to get down on the floor with them,” Annie Lee says, giving up one of her secrets. “They like you on their level.”

It must be some kind of record — it surely is for Bethpage United Methodist Church — but Annie Lee’s duties as an assistant teacher started a remarkable skein in which she has now racked up 55 years of perfect Sunday school attendance.

This past weekend, Annie Lee found herself receiving her 55th pin for the 55th year and being honored at the church’s Rally Day, marking the beginning of another Sunday school year.

Later, at the Sunday morning church service, the Rev. Mark Vickers also took time out to note Annie Lee’s achievement.

Vickers has been a pastor for 35 years. “I think the most I’ve ever had was 25,” he says of perfect Sunday school years.

Annie Lee, 91, is not sure what to make of all the fuss.

“The Lord expects you to come to his house on Sunday and give him thanks,” she says matter-of-factly. “That’s the way I look at it.”

Annie Lee used to connect her many attendance pins together and wear them as a necklace — until the necklace became too long.

“I just more or less wore it on Rally Day,” she says. “People (otherwise) would have thought I was showing off.”

Last Christmas, as her only request for a gift, she asked her family to make a shadow box that would hold her attendance pins. The long, framed piece has all her pins strung together on one side, and the perfect attendance pins of her late husband, Bill, on the other.

Although Bill was dedicated to the church, his string of pins is much shorter.

A jack-of-all-trades — carpenter, cabinetmaker, mechanic and truck driver among them — Bill Wilkinson helped put a roof on the sanctuary, along with repairing and building a lot of things around the church, including cabinets and shelves that are still in use in the Sunday school rooms.

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The perfect Sunday school attendance years Annie Lee accumulated came mostly looking after those young kids in the nursery, first as an assistant to Gladys Hinson, then as the lead teacher after Hinson died.

“I loved being in there with them,” Annie Lee says.

After she broke her hip in 2015, Annie Lee said goodbye to her nursery room and started attending a women’s Sunday school class at Bethpage. She also sits with several of the women for the morning church service.

Don’t say this out loud, but Annie Lee grew up going to St. Enoch Lutheran Church. She switched to the Methodist church only after she married Bill and they started raising their family of three boys, Wrenn, Clay and Neal.

“Bill — he didn’t care much for the Lutherans,” Annie Lee says.

Annie Lee and Bill met for the first time when he was working as a car hop at the Connoisseur restaurant in Mooresville. Annie Lee stopped by the restaurant with a group of girlfriends, and their romance blossomed from there.

They were married for 67 years.

Annie Lee (a Brumley back then) attended Landis High School and was a member of the last 11th-grade graduating class, before the school expanded to a 12th grade.

She and Bill married several years after World War II, during which he was part of the D-Day invasion forces that landed on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. Part of the 23rd Infantry, Wilkinson was sent off his landing transport in deep water and had to inflate his life belt.

A hole was shot in the flotation device, so he had to grab a log and paddle to shore. In the process, he lost his gun and ammunition. On the beach, he rearmed himself by taking the rifle of a dead soldier close to him.

Wilkinson was wounded near St. Lo a couple of months later on Aug. 13, when an enemy shell exploded and knocked him and a buddy out of their foxhole. The explosion twisted Wilkinson’s back — an injury he would deal with the rest of his life — and a piece of shrapnel tore through his foot.

Gen. Dwight David Eisenhower, who later would become president, presented Wilkinson with his Purple Heart while he was recovering in an Army hospital.

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Bill and Annie Lee first lived on Rose Avenue in Kannapolis before moving to a four-room farmhouse with an outhouse on Smith Road near Enochville. That house went through a lot of modernization and expansion through the years.

When the Wilkinsons first started attending Bethpage United Methodist, Wrenn Wilkinson recalls, the sanctuary was in a basement. Annie Lee says the congregation sold a lot of turkey dinners and hosted many oyster stews to raise money for the handsome church building that was erected off West C Street in the 1950s.

Truth be told, Annie Lee says, “We didn’t come to church regular like we should have” in those earliest years, partly because of the polio scare and concerns parents had of putting their children in large crowds.

Though Annie Lee doesn’t sing in the church choir or play any instrument, all of her boys took piano lessons. Wrenn (and his dad) joined the church choir when Wrenn was in his late teens.

Neal Wilkinson became a well-known singer who has starred in local productions and sung the national anthem in many major league sports venues.

The Wilkinson boys graduated from South Rowan High School, and all of them went on to N.C. State University. Annie Lee says she was blessed with three good sons.

“We knew if we got in trouble we’d have to answer to them, probably all three — Dad, Mother and the church,”  Wrenn Wilkinson says.

Growing up, the boys recognized that Saturday nights meant they had to polish their shoes for church the next day.

“It was not really a forced ritual,” Wrenn says of going to church. “It was just something we knew was going to take place Sunday morning.”

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Annie Lee went back to work at Cannon Mills’ Plant 1 by the time Neal was in junior high, and she worked about 20 years total for the textile company. At home, she did a lot of gardening, canning and cooking.

She’s known for her strawberry custard and light bread rolls.

Wrenn says he could smell her sauerkraut cooking when he stepped off the school bus.

Annie Lee is also an accomplished seamstress.

“Well, I made this shirt,” she says of the blouse she is wearing.

Wrenn says his mother made all the boys’ clothes except for dungarees, bib overalls and socks. Annie Lee created a white sport jacket for Wrenn’s piano recital.

Annie Lee laughs, thinking back to the time when she made a dress for herself and shirts for all the men in her family out of the same material. One Sunday, they all wore the clothing to church.

“A lady said, ‘What did you do, get a whole bolt of cloth?'” Annie Lee says.

Bill Wilkinson died in January 2016 at 96. His next birthday would have been on July Fourth. One of the boys had special pens made in the war hero’s honor, which are created out of purple heart wood and rifle bullet casings.

Annie Lee and Bill had a great life together, she will tell you. It was full of ups and downs. The event that hit the family hardest was losing Clay and his wife, Judy, in a Tuckertown Lake drowning accident in 1978.

Annie Lee still drives, still lives in the house on Smith Road and still goes to Sunday school and church, as her perfect attendance pins will tell you.

“I’ve got a lot to be thankful for,” she says.

Contact Mark Wineka at 704-797-4263 or mark.wineka@salisburypost.com.