***Of This And That In The Old North Adamsville Neighborhood-In Search Of….. Lost Teachers  

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

For those who have been following this series about the old days in my old home town of North Adamsville, particularly the high school day as the 50^th anniversary of my graduation creeps up, will notice that recently I have been doing sketches based on my reaction to various e-mails sent to me by fellow classmates via the class website. Also classmates have placed messages on the Message Forum page when they have something they want to share generally like health issues, new family arrivals or trips down memory lane on any number of subjects from old time athletic prowess to reflections on growing up in the old home town. Thus I have been forced to take on the tough tasks of sending kisses to raging grandmothers, talking up old flames with guys I used to hang around the corners with, remembering those long ago searches for the heart of Saturday night, getting wistful about elementary school daydreams, taking up the cudgels for be-bop lost boys and the like. These responses are no accident as I have of late been avidly perusing the personal profiles of various members of the North Adamsville Class of 1964 website as fellow classmates have come on to the site and lost their shyness about telling their life stories (or have increased their computer technology capacities, not an unimportant consideration for the generation of ’68, a generation on the cusp of the computer revolution and so not necessarily as computer savvy as the average eight-year old today).

Some stuff is interesting to a point, you know, including those endless tales about the doings and not doings of the grandchildren, odd hobbies and other ventures taken up in retirement and so on although not worthy of me making a little off-hand commentary on. Some other stuff is either too sensitive or too risqué to publish on a family-friendly site. Some stuff, some stuff about the old days and what did, or did not, happened to, or between, fellow classmates, you know the boy-girl thing (other now acceptable relationships were below the radar then) has naturally perked my interest.

Other stuff defies simple classification as is the case here in dealing with a posting by a classmate concerning one of his teachers that he had a run-in with (well let’s call it that) and wanted to place in the teachers’ portion of the In Memory page. Now this In Memory page is a place when one can make comments about the seventy or so classmates who have passed on over the past fifty years. Apparently (since I do not know if this is correct) the reunion committee decided to create a section to include teachers who have passed away as well (probably most except the youngest at this point). Naturally one’s take on particular teachers changes over time, mostly. Then we, most of us anyway that I knew, thought teachers were at best pains in the asses. Later, after having finished running their various gauntlets, our views mellowed.  I know in the case of my senior year English teacher, Miss (now Ms., okay) Sonos that was the case as I wrote a tribute to her on this site. Not everybody though got over the “scars” left by certain teachers, and probably should not have in some cases since then (and now too) not every teacher was a good teacher, or should have chosen the profession. Here’s Brad Badger’s take on one teacher:            

“Before I had Mr. Donohue as a history teacher in senior year he was a rather distant figure, a figure from the past who just lumbered his big frame around the corridors looking gruff, weary and ancient.  I had seen him in better days on the sidelines when he had been, before Mr. Leone, head football coach of the Red Raiders and I had gone to Saturday football games at Veterans Stadium before I entered North in 1960. I also knew from a couple of classmates on the team that he was the NAHS golf coach. If anything by senior year I would say I would have had nothing to say about the man, no story to tell.

During most of senior year that comment would also have been true since nothing remarkable happened to me in his class for most of the year. He would just drone on and on or have somebody recite from the book. Since I was/am a history nut I would just read a few chapters ahead and I did not cause any waves. He had his world, I had mine.

In the spring of 1964 I was chomping at the bit to get out of school, to move on, and I had developed a certain “angry young man” attitude, a faux “beat”/folkie persona. One day Mr. Donohue asked me a question in class about Russia and the First World War and I gave him what he thought was a surly answer. (Please, please don’t ask me what the question was or what I answered. Not these days when most of the time I don’t know where I put things never mind remembering questions about the various positions of the parties in Russia in 1917.) He told me to come see him after school. 

That afternoon the minute I got into the room where he sat alone at his desk, red-faced and seemingly apoplectic, he blurted out to me as I sat down at my assigned seat, “What are you, a Bolshevik?” Startled but silent at that remark he proceeded to harangue me about the negative consequences of being one in America for a bit and then asked me to explain my behavior in class. I made the fatal mistake of saying that I had just answered the question the way I saw it. Not satisfied with that answer he asked me to sit there and thing about it for a while-a forty-five minute while. He then asked me if I had anything to say. I said no and he said to come back after school the next day.

The next afternoon the same thing, and again he kept me for that forty-five minutes. At the end of that time he again asked me whether I had anything to say and I again answered no. You know what is coming-yes, the third day I got “hip” and figured unless I wanted to keep his company forever I had better tell him something. So I pointed out that, no, I was not a Bolshevik, in fact had worked hard passing out literature on the streets of North Adamsville for the late President Kennedy in the fall of 1960, still considered myself a Kennedy boy and not some red. We then went back and forth a bit about my “attitude” and he let it go at that, told me to go. Such are the small absurd things that happened to us as part of our coming of age. Boy was that guy a time-server by that point in his career. ”