Commentary: Spring’s arrival and school reopenings remind me of a conversation years ago, when a friend was saying that his high school French teacher had not only taught him French but held frank discussions of life from which Dan learned even more.
I suggested he write that teacher and tell him that. The teacher, likely retired, might be doubting he ever did anything worth a damn, and appreciate hearing someone recalled him gratefully.
And I realized I too had a couple of letters to write.
Sophomore year in prep school, English teacher Blair Torrey, who also coached hockey, had us write a theme each day for six weeks. It was intense training, and I still recall his human, personal comments. He loved words and nature, and had a special honesty. Gentle and thoughtful, he’d starred on Princeton’s football and hockey teams, and he’d been a Marine Platoon Instructor. In my third year, on the day I was kicked out, when my gut was churning and I had hours to kill before my parents picked me up, Mr. Torrey suggested: “Why don’t you go skate around the hockey rink and just shoot the puck against the boards?” I did, skating and thinking for hours, and in January I joined the public high school hockey team.
Eminent law professor Clark Byse taught us first-year Contract Law. If you recall the tough-minded Professor Kingsfield terrorizing first-year law students in “The Paper Chase,” that’s Byse. In a poll of Harvard students asking who was the model for Kingsfield, Byse won handily. Byse said judges would be a hell of a lot tougher on careless or witless presentations. (They were!) He was preparing us.
He was shocked to hear at lunch one day that his gruff manner hurt people’s feelings. By my third-year, changes in his personal life had left him lonely. We’d see him going to his office at all hours to work, accompanied by a little black-and-white dog.
In 1994, Robert Redford’s “Quiz Show,” made Byse mildly famous beyond the law profession. The protagonist, a young Harvard Law School graduate, feels intimidated when he has to visit a famous Columbia professor. Needing something common to both men as an icebreaker, they chose Byse. Whenever the protagonist visited, the older lawyer would ask, “By the way, how’s Clark Byse?”
Somewhere, a woman watched that movie and, a few days later, called Harvard, asking if there really was a Professor Byse. She said that during World War II, as an Ambassador’s daughter, she’d met an Army lieutenant named Clark Byse somewhere in the Pacific, and just wondered . . . They put her through to Clark, and while I don’t know exactly how well they’d known each other in the Pacific, by our 2000 class reunion, they had married.
I suggested that letters to teachers you really appreciated might be welcome. (Mine brought me back in touch with Blair Torrey, after decades! We talked at length over lunch in Maine, where he lived on an old farm. I also heard from Byse.)
Further reflection shifts my emphasis to just being in awe of some of the wonderful folks who taught me, and were still going strong. (Others seemed jerks, and I gave ‘em hell, with youth’s unwitting cruelty.) I’d prepared this column two weeks ago. Then the tragic loss of Karen Trujillo, the ultimate teacher, became my column.
Thank someone who taught you. While you can.