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.
–
30 –
[The
above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 21
March
2021,
in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on
the
newspaper's website
and KRWG’s website. A related radio commentary will air during the
week on KRWG (90.7
FM)
and
KTAL-LP.
(101.5
FM
–
http://www.lccommunityradio.org/),
and is
available on demand on KRWG’s site.]
[Early
this morning a friend who reads the Sun-News emailed me, “Amen!
I had “teachers”, both school and “non school”, that
I’ve kept in touch with until their death. Still have
youngsters popping up in life that give me new insight into the
puzzle of life I’ve been assembling for decades. If we stop and
consider our lives, we will be amazed and grateful for the abundance
of gifts that we’ve received down through the years. Expressing
gratitude is an excellent elixir of health” I
agree with his description of gratitude, which reminded me of a 2018
column (Bicycling
to the Gratitude Cafe). This column was actually sparked by
talking onn radio with my friend Rudy Apodaca, Las Cruces native and
former Chief Judge on the New Mexico Court of Appeals, who sang the
praises of a Las Cruces teacher to whom he was grateful, then having
our producer say that she’d really enjoyed that same teacher years
later. I also wanted to get across was what an unexpected boon it
was for me to have reached out to Blair and Clark.]
.
[Blair
Torrey had never intended to teach, but found teaching as a Marine
Platoon Instructor in 1954. He taught at Hotchkiss for 41 years,
retiring in 1997. He died in July 2020 at the age of 88. In 1997,
Sports
Illustrated writer E.M. Swift ’69 wrote about his former
coach: “In the spring of his final year teaching at Hotchkiss,
Blair Torrey leads his senior English class across the campus, beyond
the golf course, past a storage shed that is cluttered with piles of
tires and rusting pipes. This is an outdoors course of Torrey’s
invention, dedicated primarily to the business of seeing and the
close observation of nature, subjects dear to his heart.”
'''It’s
what we English teachers do,’ Torrey explains. ‘Try to get the
kids to see more than the obvious. Good writing is seeing things
other people don’t ordinarily see.'''
He
had been a three-sport star at Princeton: guard on the football team,
catcher on the baseball team, and hockey goalie. Somehow those three
positions sum up something about him: rugged, smart, and doing the
tough, essential, but relatively unsung work. I’m extremely
fortunate to have gotten back in touch with him. Dael and I had a
delightful lunch with him in Maine (where for forty years he had a
tree farm, which is now in the National Trust). He was a tall,
distinguished older gentleman who was great to talk with. Like Byse,
too, he found late love: he had been happily married to Ellen
Rainbolt (whose brother was a friend of his, and whose golden
retriever was a pal of mine at Hotchkiss), but a while after she died
he married Eugenia, to whom he was happily married when Dael and I
saw him, and who has survived him.]
[Clark
Byse (1912-2007) was a legend in legal circles and a warm, wonderful
guy.
Supreme
Court Justice Stephen Breyer wrote of him:
Clark
Byse as teacher taught administrative law and contract law to
generations of law students. His object was to transmit what we call
“legal thinking” — the disciplined, critical, purpose-oriented
approach that underlies American law. Indeed, Clark made a point of
telling his students, “[N]ever forget that the emphasis in this
class is on what and how you think, not on what some judge or
treatise writer or your instructor thinks.” As a teacher of legal
thinking, Clark was a giant, a master of the trade.
Clark
Byse as colleague was ever ready to discuss an issue, to take the
time necessary to help others, including many fledgling colleagues
such as myself. When I would barge through the door, concerned about
an administrative law problem, Clark would spring to life, pace back
and forth with me, arguing, discussing, provoking, as we wore out the
carpet, and he would eventually come up with the suggestion or
thought that made the difference. He loved discussion; he respected
the right to dissent; he was a champion of academic freedom, in his
words and in his deeds.
Supreme
Court Justice Elena Kagan called Byse “Professor Byse was a
brilliant and legendary teacher, a genius at using the Socratic
method to hone students’ intellects, and an uncompromising scholar
who demanded the best of both his students and himself.” She also
cited a 1958 example of his passion for academic freedom, when he
pushed Harvard not to administer a “loyalty oath” then required
of students receiving certain federal grants.
I
just know that at our 20th reunion, the ex-professor we
all wanted to get to see was Clark, who had retired from HLS 17 years
earlier.
In snagging another photo of Clark, I ran across a post by a Geoff Shephard called "A Tribute I Wrote about my Favorite Law School Professor" -- which describes at some length Clark destroying the writer as a "1L" (first-year law student), then adds this account of seeking Clark out in his office to beg for mercy:
When I found him in his office, he had no idea why I’d come. I asked him if I had
offended him in some way, and told him how devastating it was for me to be singled out
for abuse in his class. He softened immediately. He told me that he thought we had
merely engaged in intellectual jousting—for our mutual enjoyment. He knew I would be
prepared and was genuinely hurt to learn that I was almost sick with fear of him and of
going to his class. Beneath that very gruff exterior (and totally unlike Professor
Kingsfield), beat a soft and caring heart.
As it turned out, he became my mentor and best friend on the faculty, and his
insights and approach were a critical part of my legal education. I got my highest grade
in school for Byse’s class, but that part I earned (I can still recite the details of virtually
all of those early contracts cases); I also became Byse’s research assistant for the next
two years
I include this because it sure does sound like stuff I saw. However, Shephard did not turn out, politically, to be the sort of fellow Byse would agree with. With Byse's help, Shepard got a White House Fellowship. Richard Nixon was in the White House. Shepard worked directly with the Nixon folks who got jailed after Watergtate, soon started hosting reunions of Nixon Administration members, and, as his website describes it, "In 2008, Shepard’s book on the politics behind the successful exploitation of the Watergate scandal, The Secret Plot to Make Ted Kennedy President, Inside the Real Watergate Scandal, was published by Penguin."
I disagree with him, but will order the book. ]
