EAST MONTPELIER – In early June of 1962, after nine chaotic, fraught, and highly educational years in Ohio in pursuit of an undergraduate degree, I finally got one. I had the degree, a great part-time job (which I had to give up), no debts, no money, a one-year old VW Beetle, a wife and two infants.
We drove leisurely home, through Virginia, to the Adirondacks, where my former job on a blacktop paving crew awaited me We rented a flat and settled in for the summer. But the specter of the annual autumnal layoff loomed ever before us; so I cast about for permanent employment. It occurred to me one day that, with my protracted experience in education, I might be able to teach school. I wrote a letter to the area school superintendent (we had no phone, and email wasn’t yet even a gleam in Al Gore’s eye) asking if there were any openings.
Turns out there was, just one, for a high school English teacher over by Lake Champlain. I called the principal on the pay phone outside the luncheonette, got an appointment, and after an amazingly breezy interview, got the job. I’d have to go to graduate school at night in Plattsburgh in order to obtain certification; but the principal (I really liked him; retired Navy exec. officer) and his secretary found us a duplex apartment (I’m pretty sure that the two of them, along with the local banker, doctor, school nurse, and priest, knew everything about everybody in town), and we moved in. $45 a month. That may not seem like much, unless you know what they were paying me. But it was steady, and the job beat shoveling blacktop.
Ah, yes, the job. The principal’s one comment, which I took for a directive, was that he’d hired me to teach the kids that you don’t have to be a sissy to speak correctly. I had a couple of weeks to get ready, so I ransacked the cabinets in my classroom for hints of the previous years’ activity. Some good grammar and usage workbooks, some badly outdated and worn spelling books, anthologies of quite a few pretty good short stories, and no poetry or Shakespeare. I ordered paperback editions of “Macbeth” and “The Merchant of Venice” and made up my own lecture notes about anapests, iambs, hexameter, pentameter, metaphors, similes and quatrains. My old book of American chestnut poems, a gift from my mother when I was twelve, would do as a text, and give me a chance to read poetry aloud, like (I fancied) Dylan Thomas.
I got a nice sunny homeroom overlooking the parking lot and school bus garage. There was attendance to take, and excuses for absences to collect (one lively girl, now years deceased, could never, like the other girls, have a headache. Her mother, to show her superior education, always embarrassed her with “dysmenorrhea”).
The first day of classes seemed to me as dangerous as a Spanish bullfight. But I channeled my favorite teachers, who coincidentally were strict disciplinarians of quick wit and obvious empathy. How the students and I stared at each other those first few minutes! I took roll to learn names, eschewed assigning seats alphabetically, and let them sit where they were comfortable, while keeping a sharp eye on the group of large chaps seated together in middle of the back row. They got the message.
Somehow we muddled through the intricacies of they’re-there-their, its-it’s, and your-you’re. The workbooks were a great opening exercise. When one day I declared a moratorium on learning gerunds as a relatively useless pursuit, I discovered next day that the brightest kids had tackled it on their own.
Ah, we had a wonderful time! We were able in those days to tackle anti-Semitism, showing how Shakespeare, in spite of the spirit of his times, tried to justify Shylock’s ferocity by mentioning the insults he’d suffered from Christians in the streets of Venice. We invented new products and wrote ad campaigns to sell them (one of my favorites was El Lettucchi, cigarettes made from dried lettuce). I remember all those kids: Bill, Pam, Connie, Fred, Amy, Lenny, Robert, Bernie, Linda…
Yesterday I got an email invitation to join the survivors this weekend for their 60th reunion. It’ll take a day off a weekend I’d planned to spend with Bea; but as she points out, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. She’s been teaching about forty years longer than I did, so I’ll acquiesce to her advice. I very much hope that at least one of the attendees will bring up the close call I had one day when during a spelling test I mentioned that my neighbor John B. had caught his fingers in a winch.
Willem Lange is a contractor, writer and storyteller who lives in East Montpelier, Vermont.
