This spring I met with a handful of California State Board of Education members to discuss Packing the West and learn the criteria to be followed when writing the Gold Rush curriculum for the program. Some of the meetings were held in elementary school classrooms after students had left for the day. Being in that setting brought back a flood of memories, primarily of one of the teachers who helped spark my desire to write.
Dr. Augustus Bock was my high school English teacher. He loved the flirtatious tango of consonants and vowels, the steady dependability of nouns and the capricious whimsy of verbs, the strutting pageantry of the adjective and the flitting evanescence of the adverb, all kept safe and orderly by those reliable little policemen, punctuation marks. He wanted to write the great American novel and when that didn’t happen, he turned to teaching. Most of the time his passion for the vocation was infectious, but there were weeks when it was clear he believed he’d settled. It was then that the tweed jacket with suede patches at the elbows he always wore appeared as if he’d slept in it, and he started to smell like cherry pipe tobacco and defeat. I guess he didn’t understand how much his students valued him even if he never penned his version of East of Eden.
The same couldn’t be said for my British literature teacher, Evelyn DeLagrange, an Amazonian-looking woman with long red hair and an unnatural obsession with Geoffrey Chaucer. Our troubles began after she read a book report I’d written about The Canterbury Tales in which I noted that “Chaucer was an expert at making nothing happen slowly.” In a meeting Ms. DeLagrange had with my parents at the end of the semester, she suggested they take the college money they’d been saving for me and buy themselves a fishing boat because the only college she thought I’d be able to attend would have the word “beauty” or “clown” in front of it.
But I showed her. After two years studying journalism at Cochise College, in Sierra Vista, Arizona, I went on to attend the University of Arizona, where I majored in drama. When you tell someone you majored in drama, the first thing they do is mentally subtract twenty grand off what they think you make for a living. The second thing they do is ask you to bring them a menu and tell them about the soup for the day.
Some teachers make a person want to become a writer, scientist, historian, etc., because they love the subjects they teach, and that ignites a desire in their students. Other teachers drive students to their life’s pursuit just to prove that they were meant to do more than wear a multicolored wig, a rubber nose, and a massive bow tie. And that brings me back to Packing the West. With the Packing the West program, we hope to not only stir in students a love for the American West but to encourage them to strive for more, in the same way that the men and women on the frontier did. We’re just getting started, but the historical figures we’ve included in the first set of learning materials for youngsters are impressive. With Nat Love, Louisa Clappe, William Bent, Mary Graves, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Jim Bridger as teachers, anything is possible. And that should be the mantra for every teacher.
*Note to Buena High School Friends – Evelyn DeLagrange is not the real name of the teacher in the story. The name has been changed to protect Chaucer.
