The Real Muck

Bonnie, in her later years of teaching, at  George Fox Middle School

Bonnie the teacher 

surfaces in 'stuff' 

stored in the attic 

There are lessons worth learning

 on how to be a caring educator 

 

Today marks a sad milepost in my relationship with grief -- a year since the journey ended for my best friend, my wife, the great love of my life.

 I don't like the words 'death' and 'died,' and try not to use them. I had never thought about that before last March 11. So I say that her journey ended. It seems more graceful, more beautiful. 

Bonnie Schupp and I had known each other for 53 years, having met as neighbors a floor apart in Baltimore rowhouse apartments late in 1967 and come together in 1979, through a decade-long chain of circumstance, in the wake of other marriages.

Look back from where you are, contemplate events and decisions beginning early in life, and find the crossroads where you turned toward the now. The "what-ifs" of roads not taken may seem scary in retrospect, if the turn chosen brought you to love.

I wish I could find Victor Jackson to thank for our "event." He was 16 then, a Baltimore high school dropout living in the city's hardest-hit neighborhood of the rioting that followed the 1968 murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., and working for a wallpaper company to help support his single mom and family. A man he did not know was having a heart attack on the street, and Victor tried to save him -- getting the man back into his car and, despite lacking a driver's license or know-how, driving him to nearby Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Victor stayed around, sat with the man's wife and, though he did not survive, kept in touch with her. His acts of caring were somehow brought to the attention of the Baltimore Sun, where I was a newly-minted reporter and an editor handed me the information to gin up a little human interest story. And it, in turn, resulted in a call from an editor at Scholastic Scope magazine asking if I could write a version for that publication. 

Oh, and a photo of Victor was also needed. I could have asked a Sun photographer -- after all, there was a $50 payment offered for the service... a large chunk of change by the measure of the late 1960s. But I had a better idea: Bonnie was teaching in a city junior high school, where the magazine was doubtless used in classrooms, and her then-hobby was photography. A perfect match! 

The story was published in the edition of April 11, 1969 -- our first collaboration.

But there was more to Bonnie's story that I didn't learn until recently, sorting through our version of the unbelievable amount of "stuff" that people accumulate over the course of a lifetime (and that their kids likely don't or won't want). In the year since she left us, I had barely touched the surface of that problem, getting rid of "stuff."

A month ago, I started with picking what I assumed would be low-hanging fruit -- from a plastic bin among the many boxes of stuff in our attic. It was labeled "teaching." Surely an easy target destined for the dump. And then I started going through it. Bonnie had saved material from her teaching career going back half a century, keepsakes that had meaning to her -- including remembrances relating to her students and their work under her tutelage. 

What surprised me most were the letters to Bonnie in 1969 and 1970 from Katherine Robinson, editor of Scholastic Scope, expressing thanks for various articles and poems written by some of her students at Benjamin Franklin Junior High that were going to be published in the magazine in coming months. Bonnie had used her connection from the photograph of Victor Jackson to open a door of possibilities for her students. 

The first letter is dated Nov. 19, 1969, thanking her for a story and photos by 14-year-old Reginald Carpenter about community teenagers working with a Japanese teacher visiting Baltimore as a Volunteer to America, to turn a side-street dump into a garden.

 "You are an admirable teacher," the editor wrote. "I remember your submitting a poem by one of your students (which I regret we couldn't publish because we simply don't have the space) and your taking pictures of the young man from Baltimore who went out of his way to help a dying man. I'm glad to see you are now Photography Club Sponsor as well as an English teacher. Our schools need more teachers like you who are involved and getting through to their students."

Next up was Delbert Williams, and the heart of this blog post.

In the 1969-1970 school year, Bonnie oversaw a group of her ninth-grade students for a literature unit project making a short film titled "Decisions," about everyday problems that arise and how kids deal with them. "You find a wallet, for example. Do you try to return it?" the Scope article by Delbert reads. "Someone makes you angry. Do you start a fight? The movie asks you to make decisions like these."

Delbert's story in Scope 

It was not easy to make a movie in a Baltimore public school in those days, not like in our era of cell phone technology. Equipment had to be reserved and borrowed from the school administration headquarters.

"Some students wrote the script. Others were actors, directors, or cameramen. The project took a lot of planning and work," Delbert wrote. "But after seeing the film, the class was pleased. And work didn't seem like work, after all." 

The article was accompanied by four photos -- one by Bonnie Caples (her married name in those days) of young Delbert looking through a camera viewfinder, the others by Delbert of the filmmakers and the work, including one of Bonnie demonstrating for them how to adjust the movie camera on its tripod.

"You've done it again," editor Robinson wrote to Bonnie in a letter dated March 18, 1970. "Delbert Williams' photos (and your photo of him), plus his description of the "Decisions" film will appear in SCOPE, April 13.... I've notified our accounting department to send you a check for your photo of Delbert and one to Delbert in your care. We hope you enjoy the article when it appears. We appreciate very much your submitting it, and we admire Delbert's skill in story writing.

"Meanwhile, thanks again for your interest in SCOPE and in your students. Clearly, you are doing magical things with kids at Benjamin Franklin Jr. High."

There was one other letter from Robinson, dated July 8, 1970, thanking Bonnie for sending in more student work, "especially some of the poems and the definitions of love, life, pain, embarrassment, etc. We also liked and admired the original song by Joe Schelhouse and Lorraine Soustek." 

And then, it continued, came this: "We are very sorry to hear that Delbert Williams died. It came as a shock really. His article and photographs were so full of life -- not at all fraught with the knowledge of impending death. We are grateful that you encouraged him to submit his work to SCOPE."

I was stunned -- and in tears. I hadn't made the connection about Delbert being one of two black students of Bonnie's who had died back then, one by drowning and the other from sickle cell disease. I could find no story through online searches on Delbert's death, but I found a mention of him in an obituary of his mother, Ella W. Campbell, a community activist and retired Baltimore educator, published six years ago. It included among her survivors a sister, also a retired teacher, whose phone number turned up quickly in another search -- and I called her.

She was, to say the least, a tad surprised... maybe even suspicious... at my call asking about a nephew who had died nearly 52 years ago. So she asked a few questions about who was my wife, and about the Scope article -- but she happened to have a copy of it, and quickly found it to verify my credibility.

Delbert had died of sickle cell disease. And, as I subsequently learned, his only sibling, a sister who taught kindergarten, had also died of the genetic disease -- at age 45 -- two years before their mother's passing. 

Half a century through time, there's not much evidence of Delbert Andre Williams outside of family connections. But there's a magazine with his story and his picture in its yellowing pages, because he had a teacher who not only encouraged his accomplishments in school but for all the years since had kept the magazine page and those letters from the editor.

Bonnie was in her third year of teaching when she worked with Delbert. She burned out from teaching in the city four years later, and went into business with a friend/partner as owners of a camera story in suburban Severna Park. She subsequently wrote a column geared largely to amateur photography that appeared in the old Baltimore Evening Sun and newspapers in South Bend, Ind., and Prescott, Ariz., raised our two daughters, and went back to teaching in our Anne Arundel County for another 15 years.

The plastic bin from the attic, and a thick folder in one of Bonnie's very full file cabinets, had a lot more material from her second round of teaching. I am hoping for a call back from the English department head at her last school, about perhaps taking a stack of classroom guide books that would doubtless make life easier for a young language arts teacher -- but first-come can have them all.

This morning, I read through another find from the file cabinet -- a 55-page ethnographic study on underlying reasons for a teacher shortage that she wrote in 2001 for a class at the University Baltimore in working toward a doctorate in communications design. (She was awarded the degree at age 60, two years after retiring as a teacher, and subsequently focused on photography and writing.)

One thing obvious to me, from all the evidence packed into the attic and file cabinet, is that Bonnie as a teacher cared deeply about her students. And given all the challenges that teachers face, as covered in her university paper, that's not easy.

I was deeply touched when, on learning a year ago of Bonnie's journey ending, some of her former students cried. No doubt that I will, again, as I try to get rid of stuff. That's not easy, either. 

Bonnie, in a gag classroom photo: Teaching is not always easy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

... and bringing a literature unit to life, when it is.