High School Teachers (Part 2)

Let's talk about the good teachers.

Probably the best I had with Helen Weiss ("Frau Weiss") my German teacher. She was probably in her fifties or early sixties, and was very animated and able to connect with her students, calling them each by the name of an animal (as I recall) in German. I don't remember who I was, believe it or not. Her husband had worked at one of the St. Louis breweries, and she used to go to Havana to gamble (and gambol?) on vacations (that was in the Meyer Lansky, pre-Castro days, of course), which I thought very, very exotic. Each spring we would have a German party in the rathskellar of Schober's restaurant in south St. Louis County, a place where otherwise no one from my school would have ever seen.

I also had a good Latin teacher, Eugene Schmidt. He was thought to have been very bright (he probably was) and to be fluent in six languages, including Icelandic. That was as cool as vacationing in Havana. Apparently, he was stationed in Iceland during WWII, which is where he (claimed to have) picked up the language.

I only had Mr. Schmidt for one year; then I was put in Octavia Hale's class. This was tragic both for Miss Hale and me. Octavia Hale was a rather heavy-set, middle aged woman, who was clearly very nice, but who could control a class about as well as I could control a bucking bronco. I had a hard time taking anything in Latin II seriously, unfortunately, and was quite trouble maker. One day, she asked me to stop talking in class, and I told her that I did not think that I would be able to because I was bored, and that I thought I should be able to go to the library instead of sitting through an hour of boring Latin II. She said that would not at all be acceptable. I told her that, then, I was probably going to be disruptive, because that day I just could not control myself. She told me that if I continued the rest of the class as I had started it, I would be punished. What will happen, I asked, as much out of curiousity as concern. She said (believe it or not): "I will have no choice but to send you to the library."

Extra sensory perception was the rage in those days. I recall that Professor Rhyne from Duke University had been making waves talking about things like ESP and poltergeists, and had been on TV quite a bit. Miss Hale's class was the first afternoon period, right after lunch, so we often got to the room before she did (I am sure she did not want to spend more time with us than necessary). One day, my friends and I decided that it would be nice if the class were visited by a poltergeist, so we rigged up all sort of things that would fall, rattle, or clang, in series, after one string was pulled. It was all set up before class started, and I had the honor of having the string under my desk. At the pre-arranged time, I pulled the string to set off the poltergeist. It did not work out as planned.