Write to a Beloved Teacher Today!

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.

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[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.]  

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[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 20^th 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. ]