Remembering Gerald "Jerry" Boevers

Cory Franklin read this at the memorial. I've copied the entire text in case the Trib link is ephemeral.

chicagotribune.com: Why Good Teachers Matter

I recently received an e-mail from an unfamiliar address. It wasn't spam; the adult children of my old high school American history teacher were notifying his e-mail contacts of his death. Long retired, he'd been strolling through his yard on a beautiful afternoon, admiring his garden when he died suddenly (just like Marlon Brando in "The Godfather"). It has been 40 years since I was in his class but at that moment, when I got that e-mail, it felt like yesterday.

He was given the unenviable task of teaching American history from the American Revolution through the Korean War, a mission he assumed with seemingly bemused detachment. His approach was ostensibly workmanlike — you must learn this; that will be on the exam. He gave few exams, something we appreciated for the wrong reason. To him, tests were an irritant and a distraction from teaching. Grades, so important to us, concerned him very little.

But beneath the bemused detachment was a hidden passion for teaching history. Occasionally, the passion would reveal itself as he discoursed brilliantly on Jefferson, Adams or Lincoln, only to have it pass unnoticed in a sea of uncomprehending faces.

I recall the inevitable ritual when someone in class, sometimes me, would utter some inane remark offending his pedagogic sensibilities. He would run his palm across his face in mortification, shake his head ruefully and mutter incoherently under his breath. At those moments I imagined him envisioning himself at some distant, bucolic liberal arts college, teaching history to eager undergraduates. But, invariably, he'd shrug off the idiocy. Undaunted, he'd resume his efforts to describe the Battle of Antietam to us. At year's end, when we'd finished with the Korean conflict, his admiration for Harry S. Truman stayed with me.

This all occurred during the height of the Vietnam War and despite the teach-ins, sit-ins and anti-war rallies just outside his room, he never acknowledged them. Where other teachers, the "hip, cool" ones, jumped right in, he seemed oblivious to the fashionable teaching trend. As students, we demanded "relevance." He simply taught, and we mistook his attitude for indifference about global injustice. He just wasn't "with it."

Yet, ironically, a hint of subversiveness was in him. If you paid close attention, you'd notice some brief, barely noticed aside about the idiots, his superiors, who created the "dumbed down" curriculum. Most of those comments breezed right by us. In retrospect, he, not the hip teachers, was the genuine iconoclast.

Decades later, he contacted me out of the blue to discuss a newspaper piece I'd written on a subject he'd once taught. We went out for a beer, no longer teacher talking to student but more as equals. Or so I thought. It turned out he was still teaching me.

He admitted the moments of teaching exasperation were many, while those of gratification were fewer and further between. But the gratifying ones were worth the exasperation — and then some. He recalled students' names from five decades of teaching. Some were familiar, but most I'd never heard — my year was one of 40. Like Mr. Chips in the famous English novel, "Where had they all gone to; those threads he had once held together, how far they had scattered, some to break, others to weave unknown patterns."

I asked about the Vietnam War, why he studiously avoided mentioning it in class. I told him many students were disappointed he didn't express his opinions, or more accurately, the opinions we wanted him to have. He was, in fact, quite erudite about Vietnam. But he felt it wasn't his job to insert his political views into a class teaching a coherent story of American history, not contemporary events. It would inflame passions unnecessarily and could only get in the way of what students should be learning. Anyway, who could say at that point how history would judge those contemporary events? Better to let the whole thing gain perspective. Those interested would learn the facts and lessons in due time.

What we students took for his indifference in high school, I realize now, was instead a higher and more rare form of wisdom. Watching today's high school and college teachers gratuitously inject their unsolicited and often uninformed political sentiments into every "themed" lesson plan from the Roman Empire to Chinese dynasties makes one long for his old-school approach.

For old time's sake, I asked him about Harry Truman. He didn't disappoint. He nodded and laconically toasted the Missouri haberdasher. "Good man." The same could be said about him. After that I saw him several times, not as often as I would have liked.

The deaths of your high school teachers, like those of your parents, signify an ominous milestone in your own life. When they begin dying, the conductor is telling you your train stop approaches. I thought about that, of course; it's impossible not to. But those thoughts were eclipsed quickly by memories of the enjoyable and fulfilling trip traveling beside him on that metaphorical train.

A toast to Harry S. Truman and Mr. Gerald "Jerry" Boevers, two good men.