I learned last week that one of my high school ENglish teachers died last month. After years of Alzheimers and dementia he finally gave in. I didn’t see his age included in any of the writeups but he would have probably been in his 80s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We were actually pretty good friends, as far as student-teacher relationships go. We connected and had a similar sense of humor about things. He was moderator of the school newspaper and, perhaps against his better judgment, he made me editor-in-chief my senior year. There were other candidates for the role who were more serious and more likely to have focused on what high school level editors would calls “news.” But he went with me and I may never know why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the time the school paper was a well-regarded and well-read entity. Under my watch we did some stupid shit but evidently we did enough quality work, since we won a prestigious state-level award. I don’t remember the details of what this award-giving organization was but I remember the all-expense-paid trip to Orlando where a ritzy-seeming ceremony ended with me standing up and screaming my loudest after it was announced our little paper had won the highest award in the category. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That experience intrinsically involved E. I’m going to leave his full name out for now, but his direction and guidance, which essentially amounted to just letting me do whatever seemed to make sense to me, was something I didn’t fully appreciate at the time. He never gave orders but his feedback could be brutal. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the year after I graduated I returned to the school, and talked to E. He made it perfectly clear: the school paper I had edited completely went to shit the following year, and it stayed in that realm of shittiness ever since. From what I knew of the people who inherited the reigns of the paper they were largely theater kids with an agenda of sarcasm and deliberate ignorance. It became something of a joke, and this may have been refleccted in an encounter I had years later at a regional gathering of alumni from the school. These “reunions” happened every few years and, while I have no strong feelings either way about that school, I attended anyway just as a thing to do. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The encounter I had was when I told an alumnus who graduated a few years after me that I had been editor-in-chief of the school paper. He looked at me with certain puzzled chagrin, which I later interpreted as “And you’re bragging about this?” or something along that sentiment. The paper was apparently bad enough that people only worked on it for some kind of course credit or extra-curricular requirement. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I found a copy of the long-lost final edition of the paper. Among other highlights I was surprised to find that I had assigned a story about payphones. There was nothing phreak about it. For ahigh school paper it was prefecetly legitimate news to report that the old dumb payphones were being replaced by so-called “smart” payphones with LED screens and other fancy features unknkown to the previously simple world of public pay telephones. It was news across a wide range of spectrums, not just at our school. But the connection between that and my future with payphones was good for a laugh. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I never talked to E. again after that exchange. I got a copy of one of the recent newspapers and found that I was personally being lambasted and ridiculed, in sarcastic and sometimes cryptic ways. He let this go through and I let him know how I felt about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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