North Star Lane — Teacher

With school back in session, North Star Lane features two stories in honor of high school teachers. Writer Teresa Alto uses the Shel Silverstein classic, "The Giving Tree", as a way to think about her most influential teacher. And storyteller Terry O'Brien, in a live performance, describes the fallout from her brief stint as a high school English teacher. 

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Michael Goldberg 0:00

Hi, I'm Michael Goldberg, collecting stories on North Star Lane. The school year is well underway now, and today we have two teacher stories. One, a tribute to a high school teacher who changed so many lives, and another from a former high school teacher revisiting her short career. First up, Teresa Alto from Grand Rapids. I told her once that I was looking for stories about Grace, and she said, In what sense do you mean that, Grace? Naturally, I replied, in every sense you can think of. So she told me this, Teresa Alto.

SPEAKER_01 0:39

A tribute to Grace. At a time when teachers' first names seemed to be Mr., Miss, or Mrs., we all knew Mrs. Bowski's first name, Grace. We knew because even as sophomoric sophomores, we sensed there was something special about Grace Bowski, something that warranted the name Grace. She was my tenth grade honors English teacher. She retired when I graduated from high school, and she did nothing to hide her age. Grace Bowski dressed like a young married of the 1940s, because she had been a young married in the 1940s. Button-up blouse tucked into the tight waist of a full skirt that recalled the swirls of happy housekeepers and vintage advertising. She did not connect with us through youth or coolness. She inspired our allegiance through her allegiance to us. Tenth grade was the first year of our high school in Ames, Iowa, in 1983. We'd signed up for Honors English because we'd been good students at Welch and Central Junior High Schools, but this was high school now. Who knew if we'd measure up? We tried to hide our anxieties from each other and ourselves. Mrs. Bowski swept into the room. Almost all my images of her in my memory call up the verb sweep. We were all so smart, she assured us. You're all going to get A's, I'm sure, she announced. We glanced at each other. Was she serious? And then, was she insane? How would she get us to listen in class, let alone turn in homework, to say nothing of actually trying hard with that kind of uncensored remark? Grace is something freely given without consideration to whether it's deserved. God may give grace, but teachers? Grace Bowski, however, knew what she was doing. She won us over with her belief that we could read hard literary texts with intelligence, that we could analyze them insightfully in class discussions, that we could write about them eloquently. Like the recipients of God's grace, those of us basking in Mrs. Bowski's grace seemed better, maybe became better, perhaps even came to deserve that which was given without merit. In short, we did all get A's, except for Paul H, who seemed determined to test the proposition. He later became a successful scientist. We were a competitive group, we honors and AP students, comparing grades on assignments and test scores on the PSAT, ACT, and Iowa test of basic skills. So I think I can say with some confidence that we all deserved those A's as well. We rose to the level of Mrs. Bowski's expectations, thanks to her grace. Mrs. Bowski had a mania for fresh air, eliciting groans when she raised open the big double-hung windows in the winter. This is one of my other images of this classroom, cool air whooshing in and swirling around us, the old radiators hot to the touch, clanking.

unknown 3:32

Mrs.

SPEAKER_01 3:32

Bowski was hospitalized for a severe asthma attack that year. I went to see her with my best friend Carrie. She lay back on the white hospital linens looking spent. Little plastic tubes went into her nostrils. I noticed for the first time the wrinkles on her face. Her gray hair was still in its tidy bob, and she smiled weakly, clearly touched that we'd come. We brought a book to read to her, Shell Silverstein's The Giving Tree. The Giving Tree tells the story of a boy's relationship to a tree and the trees to the boy. It starts, once there was a tree, and she loved the little boy. Every day the boy collected her leaves, played hide and seek with her, ate her apples, and climbed her. And the tree was happy. As the boy grew older, however, he was a waymore. He came one day to the tree, saying he was too big to climb and play. Instead, he said, I want to buy things and have fun. I want some money. The tree offers him apples to sell for money. We were the age of the boy when he wants money to buy things and have fun. Did Mrs. Bowski give us apples to sell? A's were like apples sold on our transcripts for college admission. We were checking the boxes of achievement. We read 1984 and 1984. Shakespeare, Salinger, Harper Lee. The boy of the giving tree is an everyman, a term I likely learned in Mrs. Bowski's class. As we 10th grade honors English students looked ahead, we thought about college and tried to envision ourselves in successful careers and happy lives. Through the years, the boy in the giving tree comes back to the tree, always to get something. Acquisition that leaves the tree diminished. He returns as a mature man, eager to build a home and have a family. The tree gives him branches to build a home. I became an English teacher, inspired by teachers like Mrs. Bowski. Dendrites in the brain look like branches reaching out and up to the sun with new twigs and leaves. Mrs. Bowski and my other teachers gave me branches to build a vocation. The boy returns to the tree as an old man, disillusioned and wanting to go far away. The tree offers her trunk for him to make a boat to sail away. The tree has left a stump. The familiar refrain altered this time. And the tree was happy, but not really. She is alone and used up. I regret now that I never told Mrs. Bowski that I became an English teacher or thanked her for what she did for me, for all of us as a teacher. Finally, the boy in the giving tree comes back as a very old man. The tree is crestfallen that she has nothing left to give him. I don't need very much now, said the boy. Just a quiet place to sit and rest. The tree provides a stump as a place for the boy to sit and rest. And the tree was happy. After her retirement, Mrs. Bowski moved to Iowa's little version of Minnesota lake life, Lake Okiboji, with her husband. She was honored by her colleagues and several former students with a brick on the Plaza of Heroines at Iowa State University in 1994. They titled it A Love Story, Pure and Simple, to describe Grace Bowski's teaching career at Ames High School. A journalism scholarship was established in her name at Ames High after her death in 2006. She kept on giving. The final drawing of the Giving Tree shows the boy as a very old man sitting over the heart he'd carved in the tree as a child. M-E-N-T, me and tree. The original, freely given love returned. Remembering that book and writing this essay is an act of saying grace, a thanks for beneficence given, confident of merit. Thank you, Grace Bowski. May Grace be with you.

Michael Goldberg 7:36

Thanks to Teresa Alto Run. One of our featured performers was Northwoods storyteller Terry O'Brien from Somy Township in rural Itasca County. As a young woman, she wasn't quite sure what work she should pursue, and her first stab at a career didn't work out quite as she had hoped. Here's Terry O'Brien.

SPEAKER_02 8:30

Somehow I ended up getting a degree in 1971, a Bachelor of Science in English Education from the University of Minnesota. And I took a job as an English teacher in a small southwestern Minnesota town, population of 476. Now I'm not gonna say what town that was. You're thinking as if I might have an outstanding warrant for my arrest there. As if I did something to earn eternal shame, eternal notoriety. As if were I to utter the name of that place, you might say knowingly, ah. I remember hearing about that. That was you. Well, to be perfectly honest, there was a charge against me. And I would say, in the present-day sense of the term, it was a trumped-up charge. I was cited for having a compost pile illegal within town limits. My neighbor woman, I think, had something to do about it. She prided herself on knowing everybody's dirty deeds. She let it about that there was an entire hog's skin simmering just beneath the surface of my compost pile, and it was attracting rats. I had to take a day off from school without pay to go to the county seat to plead my case before the judge, and it wasn't hard. No, it wasn't. Because I pointed out to him if my compost pile is emanating offensive odors, on the other side of town, totally within city limits, is a small hog operation. Talk about odors. And if my compost pile is attracting rats, two blocks away from where I live is the grain elevator. Talk about rats. And if anybody wants to pick their way through my compost pile to look for the purported hog skin, they're welcome to it. Of course I beat that rap. I was found guilty of bad language. One night in the polar bar, I casually dropped the F word into a conversation which incensed a local man. He, in addition to the having and keeping for better or worse, for richer or poorer, had apparently also vowed to protect his wife's virtue, her virginal ears. Now she was a smart woman, a tall woman, but that night way too loaded to follow the conversation. He abruptly jumped up, jerked her out of her chair, and hauled her out of the bar. Was I shamed? Oh, yes, I was properly shamed. One Sunday, I was denounced from the pulpit of the Peace Lutheran Church. Does anybody see the irony in that for beginning my American lit class with a unit on Native American oral tradition? Just before the bread and wine course, the pastor raked me the sacrificial lamb over the coals for introducing pagan ideology to innocent minds. But here tonight, I am going to admit to a crime. It was illegal then, and I was a repeat offender. I smoked marijuana after hours in the plumbing and heating shop with some fellas more than once. They were brothers, older brothers of some of my students. They had recently returned from Vietnam, and not to justify anything or anything, but people were always thinking I was trying to sell drugs to their kids when they were trying to sell it to me. My husband of the time and I would drive way out into the country. We'd uh stop at a wayside rest or the pull off to a wildlife management area. We'd roll a number, we'd light it up, we'd inhale. And exhale. And temporarily, we would be freed from the strictures of small town living, from the scrutiny, the never-ending scrutiny of our critics, until someone jump-hunting ducks strolled out of the slough, a 12 gauge over his arm, and the very next day another rumor circulated about suspicious activity involving the new English teacher. But I really think that my biggest crime was that my students liked me. And rookie error, I wanted them to like me too. Perhaps that's why I invited them to the vacant lot wedged between two buildings on Main Street where I would teach them how to truck. To truck the infinitive form of an intransitive verb, trucking the gerund. Use it in a sentence. Well, blind boy Fuller did it best back in 1936. Uh song lyric. Keep on trucking mama, trucking your blues away. Now, Robert Crumb, better known as R. Crumb, a cartoonist, was inspired by those lyrics to create a one-page comic that appeared in the very first issue of Zap Comics. That's comics with an X, which gives you some idea of the transgressive content of this underground comic book, namely drug use and riotous raunch. My husband at the time bought the comic book at the electric fetus. Now, before it became the well-respected and eclectic music store that it is today, the fetus was a tiny head shop at ground zero of Minneapolis' countercultural scene, the West Bank. Yeah. Some people claim that the name of the electric fetus was for another drawing by R. Crum that made it onto the cover of another issue of Zap Comics. It featured a whacked-out psychedelic dude with bugged-out eyes and frazzled hair. He had been shocked off his feet, airborne into a fetal position, the power cord emanating from suggesting an umbilical cord. Now, lest you let your imagination run away with you, I never brought Zap Comics into the classroom. All I did was invite my students on a Friday night after the football game to that little vacant lot on Main Street where I would demonstrate trucking. Now, I gotta tell you about that one-page trucking cartoon in Zapcomics. It was uh five panels. Uh two of them feature jaunty gentlemen doffing their hats. Others are average Joes. The uppermost panel are four identically dressed men in single file in synchronized motion doing that trucking strut. Now, if you haven't seen it, let me tell you, our crumb draws, oftentimes from a worm's eye view, from the ground up. So his uh women that he pictures, they are giantesses. They have enormous feet and big legs emanate upwards from them, towering people. If one of them stepped on you, why you'd never walk straight again. But on that page, there are no women pictured, and neither is one of his most popular characters, uh what was his name? Mr. Natural. He was a guru kind of guy. He had a long white beard, and uh kind of like uh back there, and uh and a flowing robe. And nor was uh uh Crumb's maybe most famous character, the libidinous Fritz the Cat, pictured on that page. Instead, it was all these guys, and there in that uppermost panel are these four guys in synchron synchronicity, however you say that. And uh their right arm is a kimbo and their left arm is doing a little hidey hidey ho or rootie toot toot move, and they're all trucking. I'll tell you how to do it in just a moment. Well, bless their hearts. My students came to that vacant lot and we lined up against one's wall, and I said, now you gotta stick one foot way out. And they did. And you gotta lean way back, and now all you gotta do is strut your stuff right over to the other side. And by golly, that's exactly what they did. We strutted across to the other wall and back, and we did it again, and we did it again. We were trucking. Well, I had just one year with those students before I was forced to bow out. And I also want to tell you, after two weeks on the job, the superintendent called a special meeting of the school board with the object of eliminating, terminating my position there. Their lawyer advised them otherwise. I returned just once to that little berg on Minnesota's Buffalo Ridge. My visit was unannounced. I didn't see anybody I knew. But I did pin a makeshift calling card on the bulletin board across from the bank. Main Street was as desolate as it ever was, maybe more so. The vacant lot, it was still vacant. That card on it, I wrote, Terry O'Brien, English teacher, 1971 to 72. And in bigger letters, in all caps, I wrote keep on trucking. Thank you. In 2026, today, if they survive the Vietnam War, the farm crisis of the eighties, the AIDS epidemic, Y2K fever, the Great Recession of 2008, and all our desert storms, my seniors are now in their early seventies. They have known loss, they have known health challenges, bad marriages, one thing and another. I like to think that some Sunday after church, after dinner, one will stroll down Main Street, or maybe Monday morning before a meeting with the loan officer to uh finance this year's crop, one will go over to the Bulletin Board and see what implements are for sale. And they'll find my card there. Now, I don't care if they remember that night's hippie chick drum majorette. It's the message that's important. Despite what might and what will befall you, square your shoulders, stand up straight, and people say it, keep on trucking!

Michael Goldberg 22:51

Terry O'Brien and Teresa Alto are featured storytellers today on North Star Bay. Our musical interludes are provided by Sam Milch. Our program is sponsored by the Northern Civil Defense Network. You can find out more about the network and more stories at ncdn.org. Keep telling your stories, friends. I'm Michael Goldberg. And if you have a story to share, I can be reached through that website, ncdn.org.