Epilogue
August 1962
Bob Lehrer stepped through the front doors of Baldwin High School on a Friday morning in late August with an eager and anxious heart. Just twenty-two and fresh out of school, he was not due to report to his first teaching job until the following Monday, when a week of teacher in-service days would begin, followed by his first year in the classroom as a high school English teacher. But as a brand-new employee, he’d been asked to stop by the school a little earlier to pick up his room key and fill out a few personnel forms.
“I’ll be there all day on Friday,” the school secretary had explained when she’d called his apartment, her warm, welcoming voice not unlike his grandmother’s. “So just drop on in when you can.”
He’d been to the building only once before, earlier that spring, for his interview with Principal McDonough and a few other administrators. Central Office had set up meetings for all the student teachers in the district in the hopes a match would be made between prospective teaching candidates and schools that had openings. Bob had attended them all in gray slacks, a short-sleeved white dress shirt, and a dark blue tie. After each interview he’d washed the shirt in his kitchen sink and carefully ironed it, so it would be prepared for the next one. It was the only good shirt he owned.
Bob had enjoyed meeting with Mr. McDonough, who had struck him as both sensible and kind, and who had asked thoughtful questions. Bob had tried to offer answers that painted him as both insightful and hardworking. But he knew Baldwin High was a large school with a strong reputation in the community. Surely they would not take a chance on a greenhorn like him, whose only experience had been a semester of student teaching in a small semirural high school on the outskirts of the city, student population two hundred. But not long after his interview, he received a call with exciting news.
“Somebody over at Baldwin saw something in you,” said the woman at Central Office over the phone. “They want you to start in the fall. You’ll be teaching tenth graders.”
Bob hung up the phone, stared out the window of his small, first-floor apartment, and smiled at the oak trees that lined his street. It was a plum assignment, he knew. He called his parents and a fellow student teacher who had become a friend to share his good news before he sank into the sofa and came to the realization that this was all happening. He was going to be a teacher. It was still something of a strange turn of events when he stopped to consider it.
Bob Lehrer had headed off to college without much of a plan in mind other than to major in English. He’d been a decent student in high school, a strong writer of term papers and essay exams, a lover of novels and short stories. He enjoyed Russian literature during a time when enjoying Russian literature was considered mildly transgressive, yet that hadn’t stopped him from plowing through thick hardcovers with such speed and enthusiasm that he often found himself dreaming of the characters. Occasionally, he felt compelled to try his hand at writing his own fiction, huddled over the Royal typewriter he’d received from his grandmother as a high school graduation present. He spit out little bits of prose here and there and read them out loud to himself while his roommate was at class. What he wrote was fine, but what he really craved was reading the work of others and making sense of writers far superior to him. There was a magic to it, and a warmth. He came to know certain books so intimately that on some level it still occasionally surprised him that the characters inside those pages were not real.
That there were more books in the world than he would ever have time to read was equal parts comforting and troubling.
Bob went on dates but never had a steady girlfriend. He attended class but could not determine a career. Graduation loomed, and his well-meaning father continued to suggest that Bob join him in running the family’s small chain of hardware stores. The idea of spending the rest of his adult life thinking about hammers and bolts and fifty different types of nails made Bob Lehrer grit his teeth with anxiety. Yet he feared this might become his future.
Affable but a little shy, Bob found that his popularity increased as he became known as something of a go-to man when it came time to writing papers or making sense of dense texts, even in courses in which he wasn’t enrolled. Once, when a member of the university’s football team asked him to explain a passage from a history textbook and Bob complied—the ability to do so coming to him rather easily, to be honest—the football player had gazed at Bob with an expression that was almost one of wonder.
“You know, Bob, you always make this junk more clear to me,” he said appreciatively. “You make it more clear than some of the professors in this place.”
“Well, the better choice is I make it clearer ,” he told the football player. “But thank you.”
The exchange made an impression on Bob Lehrer.
And then, on a bitterly cold January day in 1961 when Bob was a junior in college and feeling as uncertain as ever about his future, a young and impressive new president asked his fellow citizens to consider not what their country could do for them, but what they could do for their country. Watching the speech with his floormates on a small black-and-white set in the common room of his dorm, Bob found the line particularly moving, a strong example of chiasmus. A moving and emotional appeal. His mind traveled back to the compliment the football player had paid him, as well as the ease with which he approached the analysis of the written word. The next day he inquired about a program his college offered that would allow him to graduate with his teaching certificate and an English degree.
And so that brought him to now, to entering Baldwin High School on this August afternoon. To heading down the polished floor and into the main office, where the school secretary who had telephoned him earlier—a Mrs. French—greeted him warmly.
“Principal McDonough is in a meeting at Central Office,” she explained, “but he sends his regards and says he can’t wait for you to start on Monday.” She supplied Mr. Lehrer with a key and a stack of personnel forms, which he worked through efficiently in a small conference room at the back of the main office.
Upon giving his papers back to Mrs. French, he asked if he might be able to take a quick peek at his classroom up on the third floor.
“Of course,” she said. “Feel free to look around.”
Baldwin High had been built a few years earlier as the city expanded. The launch of Sputnik had lit a fire in towns and communities across America that had prompted them to pour money into their public schools in an effort to keep up with their sworn enemies on the other side of the world. The students at Baldwin had benefitted. The building was clean and modern and fresh. Inside the library, Bob found rows upon rows of brand-new hardcover books. The tall windows gleamed. Every corner of the building seemed to suggest that this was a serious place where young people came to learn about serious things.
On the way to his classroom, he passed a room with a small sign affixed to it: english department book room . Inside, in careful, well-organized stacks, he found all his old friends. The Last of the Mohicans and Jane Eyre and Romeo and Juliet and Great Expectations . They were all here. He picked up a copy of Pride and Prejudice and flipped through it carefully, imagining what it might be like to dig through the text with his students. He wondered what books would even be assigned to the tenth graders. And how could he possibly be ready for them in just a few days? Bob put the book back and tried to settle the wave of anxiety that rolled through him.
Just a few doors down he found his classroom, functional and orderly. In an effort to keep the room cool during the warmer months, there were rows of awning windows that could be cranked open to let in fresh air. Tucked into a corner were two metal file cabinets, and along the back wall were several built-in bookshelves and another small cabinet for storage. At the front sat a heavy, imposing wooden desk and a straight-backed teacher chair. The student desks were arranged in careful rows, facing front, toward the chalkboard. It took Bob a beat to remember that the teacher desk was meant for him.
He walked to the front of the room and turned to face the empty rows.
“Good morning,” he said. Then he tried once more, projecting his voice a bit louder this time: “Good morning!” He tried to imagine the faces that would soon be in these seats, looking up at him. Expecting him to teach them something. He couldn’t believe that people in positions of authority were actually letting him do this, and he half-expected someone to walk in and say there had been a mistake and there was no need for him to return on Monday.
Finished with his brief tour, his mind littered with necessary preparations and questions and concerns he knew would simply have to be answered in due time, Bob stopped by the main office on his way out to say good-bye to Mrs. French. The mechanical punches of her Smith Corona were put on hold for a moment.
“Well, we’ll see you Monday, Mr. Lehrer,” she said with a wink. “Ready or not.”
Mr. Lehrer. The title startled him as much as it excited him. Mr. Lehrer .
“I don’t know if I could ever be ready,” he confessed to Mrs. French shyly. “There’s so much I still need to understand.”
The school secretary laughed gently but not unkindly. Taking a loose pile of papers and knocking them into a neat stack against her desk, she smiled at him.
“No one is ever really ready for the first day,” she said. “So the best you can do is show up and hang on.”
He nodded and thanked her for the advice, then left the main office.
As he made his way down the wide hall, the freshly waxed floor glimmered as if it were showing off. A growing sense of pride filled him as he walked past polished wooden cases with glistening glass fronts that held tall athletic trophies and burnished silver cups and elaborate plaques engraved with the achievements of Baldwin students. Of course, he was new here, and he wasn’t sure if he was exactly entitled to this feeling just yet. He hoped he was.
But it wasn’t just pride, he realized. It was something else. A feeling of purpose and of belonging. A sense of committing to a cause much bigger than he.
He allowed himself a brief smile as he made his way to the end of the hallway.
After pushing open the main doors and heading out into the front courtyard, lush in its summertime greenness, he stopped and turned to look at Baldwin High. At its red brick solidness. At its presence, both utilitarian and dignified. On Monday it would be filled with other teachers joining him in meetings, in lesson preparations, in classroom rearrangings. And then, in what he was sure would be sooner than he could ever imagine, the students would arrive, pimply faced, anxious, eager, or perhaps not so eager. Could he ever really be ready for them?
No one is ever really ready for the first day , Mrs. French had told him. The words brought him some comfort, but not nearly enough.
For a beat or two longer he stood there in the courtyard in that thick August heat, surrounded by the nervous buzz of cicadas. He gazed at Baldwin High School, almost willing it to hear him as he silently hoped that he would not fail or at least not fail miserably, as he quietly prayed that he would be the sort of teacher who did right by his students and always gave his best. Then, the sense of purpose he had felt in the hallway coursed through him again. He took it as a sign that perhaps he had been heard, and he was reassured.
Here, in this place, he would become Mr. Lehrer.
Here he would do good work.