Lafayette Elementary School in south St. Louis, from which my father graduated in 1927.

ALAN writes:

One day in 1988 my father thought about holding a re-union of his grade school classmates.  Then he acted on that idea and organized the first in a series of such re-unions that would continue for 25 years.

He had fond memories of some of the teachers in the public elementary school that he attended in the 1920s.  He and all of his classmates walked to and from school.

At one such reunion, I met a woman named Marjorie who taught in St. Louis public grade schools for decades, as did her twin sister Margaret. They worked in years when the schools in St. Louis were vastly different from what they are now (meaning: much better).

Marjorie attended Pestalozzi Elementary School in south St. Louis, which was torn down many years ago with virtually the entire neighborhood around it.  She still keeps in contact with her high school classmates.

When the class re-unions became too much work for my father, friends Roger and Anita and teachers Marjorie and Margaret were some of those who kept the re-unions going.  I think about Marjorie and her sister whenever I read reminiscences of teachers who are remembered partly because they were good teachers but mostly because they were good human beings.

After the first class re-union, a woman wrote to my father to express her gratitude:

“I had a hankering to see the old school and neighborhood for quite a while but hesitated to ask anyone to take me for fear they’d think I was getting senile,” she wrote.  “The re-union made that possible.  I thought:  You won’t know anyone and it will be a boring afternoon.  How wrong can a person be?  I, like everyone else, enjoyed it to the hilt.  ….Any number of people spoke to me and two women asked me if I remembered their mothers who also were in the 1909 class.  ….Miss Hackstaff was the eighth-grade teacher and she was a great teacher.  She demanded and got respect (and fear) but you learned her lessons….”

After the 1990 re-union, a man sent my father a 4-page handwritten letter to convey his gratitude and describe memories of some of the families and places in the old neighborhood.

When Marjorie and I exchange letters, she sends me hand-printed notes on stationery decorated with details recalling old elementary school classrooms, like apples for the teacher, and letters in upper-case and lower-case like those that could once be seen on classroom blackboards.

How many Americans in future will write 4-page handwritten letters or elegant hand-printed notes?

[Compare these TTH postings: “The End of Cursive,” Nov. 19, 2011; “A Letter Home,” Jan. 4, 2012; “Comments on a Letter Home,” Jan. 6, 2012, and “The Handwritten Letter,” August 25, 2020]

Andy Rooney wrote about one of his teachers and about his reaction when reading of his death on the newspaper obituary page:

“I dropped the paper to the floor next to the bed and stared at the ceiling.  Mr. Hahn was dead.  Tears came to my eyes, unbidden.  Why hadn’t I called him?  I was surprised to find myself crying.  I hadn’t seen Mr. Hahn for forty years…..  He lived only a 35-cent phone call away, but I never called him.  No one influenced my life more than he did.  Now he’s gone and I don’t think I ever told him…..  I went to the service for him today.  I don’t know why…..  There was no one there I knew, and one phone call over the years would have meant more to him…..  A young woman who taught with him spoke, and she brought the tears back to my eyes.  He had touched her life in the 1970s as he had touched mine in the 1930s…..”

[Andy Rooney, “He never called the teacher who meant so much to him,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Sept. 7, 1981 ]

I knew exactly how Andy Rooney felt at those moments because I reacted the same way when learning of the death of certain friends or family members to whom I owed much gratitude.

Because it was so long ago, only dimly can I remember the Catholic nuns who taught in my parochial school.  I have clearer memories of four men who taught in high schools in the 1960s:  Brother Lawrence Gonner, who taught music appreciation;  Mr. Fred Slade, who taught English;  Mr. Frank Armijo, who taught mathematics;  and Mr. John Simpson, who taught American history.

I did not like high school, but I respected those four men.  They were never my pals, nor did I expect them to be.  But nor were they my adversaries.  They were not clowns.  They were not there to entertain.  They were there to do a job and to do it right.  They were grown men, not boy-men.  All of them wore white shirt and tie.  They projected gravitas and masculine authority in years when those things were still common among American men.  At times I felt a degree of sympathy for them when they had to endure idiots in the classroom.  I know that two of them died many years ago.  I do not know whether the other two are still alive.

They did not mean as much to me as Andy Rooney’s English teacher did to him.  Nonetheless they were decent, principled men in a profession overpopulated with clowns, pretenders, and opportunists.  But like Andy Rooney, I regret not having written to them years ago to tell them as much and that I remember them fondly.

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