Recently my
high school class (1965) had a “65th
Birthday and Medicare Sign-Up Party.” Our MC was Student Body President and
family friend “Tooey” Emery ( Gen. Curtis H. Emery II, USAF, ret.) As a former
class official (Student body Vice President the year we graduated), I was asked
to give a tribute to our teachers. It didn’t come out quite as I expected, but
here is what I wrote:
I
am here to pay a tribute to those teachers who taught us from 1953 to 1965.
When I stopped to think about it, I realized that we were Neanderthals being
educated in a stone age. Those teachers who write books about teaching deprived
children in Alaskan or African villages have nothing over our teachers.
I always liked school and loved
learning, so when I sat down to reflect on our experience, I was surprised to
realize that my first memories were the bad stuff. I can’t even pretend that all of our teachers
were great, or even good. You remember which ones were sarcastic and snide and
which ones really didn’t like kids. Mrs.
8-Brown [8th grade teacher as opposed to 7-Brown who taught 7th
grade] told me once, “I know those boys didn’t like me very much, but I didn’t
like them very much, either. “ She wielded a mean paddle, and it’s beyond my
imagination today to thinking of striking some other person’s child with a
stick.
There were bad acts. One teacher
tried to teach that all races were created equal, but then he added, “Except
for Pendleton Indians,” and he meant it. One teacher was so adamantly opposed
to drinking that he told us that he had a friend whose job it was to fish the
rats out of beer vats. I ran straight
home and told my Dad about that, because he liked a cold beer after a hard
day’s work. He laughed it off, and said that brewing was a highly regulated
industry—and besides, a rat would ruin the whole batch. And Mrs. Hansen, who was a good teacher,
opened class by having us sing the Doxology from the English Book of Common
Prayer, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow….” That’s unconstitutional.
Most were not malicious, but they
could be uninformed. A third-grade teacher kept a human skeleton in her closet
until years later when a great teacher appropriated it for the high school
biology class. One teacher claimed that
you could get lead poisoning from the “lead” in a pencil, which happens to be
graphite. Being an obnoxious little wretch, I corrected her. [The same teacher talked about “see-same”
until I told her that was “sesame.”] Think about what we learned. In 1492,
Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and discovered America. However, Columbus
probably never even saw the North American coastline, let alone set foot on it.
And the Mayflower pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, and colonized the rest of
the United States, rights? A Hispanic
friend of mine points out that if they had landed instead at San Diego, they
would have found a modern city and a Catholic cathedral.
Some of our teachers were neither
malicious nor misinformed, but just eccentric, like Miss Porter. When the Superintendent of Schools was
showing a group of financiers around the City to try to win financing for a
bond issue, he saw Miss Porter walking along side the road, dragging home a
board that she had salvaged from a construction site. He pretended he didn’t know her. When she was
older, she learned to drive, and got a flat tire at Cushman [two miles east of
Florence up the river]. When some of her former students saw her, they pulled
over to help. When she saw teen-aged
boys in sunglasses and shorts getting out of their car, she jumped in and drove
off, flat tire and all. [After, one of the band members performing added that
when she was at least 117 years old, he saw her on top of her house, patching
the roof. She used to park her car very
close to the school. Much closer than she intended, in fact.]
But those teachers took good care of
us. Mrs. Miles dabbed rubbing alcohol on
my flea bites. I realized years later
that she was probably checking to make sure it wasn’t lice that I could spread
to the other kids. And when Douglas
threw up, Mrs. Reece just cleaned up the mess and kept on teaching.
And they performed magic. They took
our unformed little minds and taught us reading, writing and arithmetic. You know, many schools no longer teach
cursive handwriting. You have to seek a
back-alley education if you want to learn to curse.
The teachers were decorous. They
wore suits and always used titles: Mr.,
Mrs., Miss. That’s because they had to
go to court and change their first names to Mr., Mrs. or Miss in order to get a
teaching certificate. Together with a couple of doctors, a couple of dentists,
and a couple of pharmacists, they were the only educated people in town. We
didn’t know them as real people. But they had experiences and personalities.
[This part left out due to time. Consider our High School librarian, Mrs.
Mulholland, whom I knew as a family friend.
She was a Hungarian Jew who was sent to France to hide in a convent when
the Nazis threatened Hungary. When
France was invaded, she was sent to the Dominican Republic before eventually
coming to the United States. ]
But consider what they taught us,
given the tools they were given to teach us. Let’s start with music. [left
out: the music teacher put one of the
Scott twins in the closet and forgot about him all day.] We learned to sing “My
Country ‘Tis of Thee,” “America the Beautiful,” the caisson song, the Marine
Corps Hymn, and when Tooey has a restless evening, he still breaks out his
trombone and plays “Off we go into the wild blue yonder….” [Tooey is class
president General Curtis Harding Emery II, USAF (ret.)]
Miss Palmer taught music by terror. Every quarter at grade
time, she had each student stand up and sing a scale, solo. Every quarter she started at the top of the
alphabet, and luckily for me, she never got to “Sampson.” She got as close as
my friend Lois Pitmann, and I was next.
I mentioned that once it Jimmy Shelton, and he said, “Tell me about it!
I was next after Sampson.”
When Joe Wood wanted to have a dance
band, Mr. Abischer went into the music library and found sheet music for “Begin
the Beguine.” That song was popular in 1935. Still, we had a choir, a concert
band, and a marching band for the football games and the Rhododendron Parade,
and we got professional musicians out of the class [pointing to the group
behind me, where somebody played a little riff.
See Denny Weaver on U Tube. He
and percussionist Mike Phillips, despite the loss of a couple of fingertips in
a sawmill accident, are very, very good, and have been pro for years.]
Those teachers also taught us health
and fitness. That meant teaching sex education with film strips. There was no mention of contraception or
family planning, and certainly no discussion of gay, lesbian or transgender
issues. As far as we knew, you were a lesbian if you wore red on Thursday. It took
guts for a couple of our teachers to come out.
But the film strips left me with one unanswered question—Why was it that
only boys got to run the projector? [Mr. Harrington, Sandy’s fourth grade
teacher, eventually was divorced from his wife and came out. His daughter
Sandra was in my class. When the speech was over, she said “Thank you.” The
other teacher who came out did so much more flamboyantly. She was the school
nurse, Mary Erlandson, whose husband Ole was a merchant seaman. They had three
kids starting a year younger than I.
When he returned from a voyage, she locked him out of their house,
divorced him, and adopted a Navy nurse she had met to be her “daughter.”]
Geography was another course they
tried to teach, but our books were probably outdated from the outset. We were
taught that Central and South America were comprised of “Banana Republics”
occupied by little brown men wearing white pajamas and carrying machetes. When I saw Panama City and Cartagena,
Columbia, last spring—the centers of drug cartels—I saw highly industrialized seaports
and skylines full of skyscrapers to put Manhattan to shame. But we were about
to learn geography another way—by seeing our friends and relatives off the
Vietnam.
We met a new generation of teachers
in High School. Our class was the first huge class of post WW II war
babies. Somebody had seen us coming and
built a whole new primary school building for us, but it has already been torn
down as being obsolete. That says something about our age. I learned tonight that to meet the demands of
our class, the system hired 18 new teachers. They were blunt talkers. Mr. Rankin was our American History teacher
and rifle coach. (Imaging a school having a rifle team today!). He spoke to us
when President Kennedy was assassinated, and said that the tragedy was not that
he died, because we all die. The tragedy
lay in how and why he had died, and that is a lesson that remains relevant
today. And he told us to avoid hero
worship, that our heros were all fallible human beings. I was shocked—I always thought that Davy
Crockett was perfect. [Dave Rankin was our guest of honor.]
Mrs. Lutero was also blunt. On the last day of school, she warned us,
“Don’t get married too soon.” Of course, we ignored her. In fact, Rhanda Smothers told her that she
was getting married the next day.
I want to conclude by sharing an
anecdote from my college history course. A classmate who was black was asked to
speak about what it meant to be black in America in 1968. She was petite,
pretty, with straight hair. She was not a fire-breathing radical. She didn’t
like sports, she liked to play bridge. Her husband wasn’t an athlete, he was an
engineering student. She recited all the stereotypes and defeated them because
she didn’t fit them. She said that in
her experience, there were two kinds of people, those who were decent and those
who were not. And in this group, I see people who are good and decent and kind.
Our teachers were good, and decent, and kind people, and we owe them our thanks
for being our role models for that. ###
After my speech, Mr. Rankin spoke.
Our class was his first as a teacher. He told about being recruited: Dick Schollenberger, the Superintendent of
Schools, called him up and asked if he’d like to be interviewed for a job at
Florence, and he said yes, and “How about three o’clock.” Mr. Schollenberger came to his apartment in
the student housing “slum” called Amazon Village outside the U of O in Eugene,
with half a case of Olympia beer. They each drank a couple and each man
automatically peeled the label off the bottle to see how many spots were
printed on the back. Lore at the time was that one, two, three or four spots
indicated how lucky you were going to get at your next sexual encounter.
He also said
that he never had a discipline problem with our class, although Billy Grover
was a “Reluctant learner.” When Jay Martin was tipping back in his chair, Nicky
McNeff reached over and tipped him the rest of the way, crashing him to the
floor. Mr. Rankin thought it was funny, but he kept a straight face.
After he retired, Mr. Rankin and his
wife Diane, a school librarian, bought a ketch and spent 4-1/2 years sailing
around the world, then came home to Florence, OR and sold the boat. They had
always thought that Florence would just be a stepping stone to some bigger
town, but they liked it, and they stayed.
Today, “Every day is a Monday.”
He works 7 days per week because he wants to, on woodlands management.
And because Florence is a small, I
have since found out that his son, who is a contractor in Florence, has a wife
who is a teacher who taught Sandy’s son Ricky, and she got through to him: He read two whole series of books because he
wanted to while he was a student in her class.
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