47 All dead

Los Gatos High School

 

 Of course they are all dead now, the teachers I had crushes on in high school.

After writing yesterday's post I searched for my old Latin prof and found that he had accepted cancer's final invitation in 2012 at the age of 81.  The two other teachers I loved with my crazed high school passion, Mr. Ridgely and Mr. Glasner, are also gone.

Mr. Ridgely was an English teacher of no great good looks.  About fifty, balding and pot bellied, he was fierce, funny and demanding.  In a senior year English class he had us read and think about Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus.  One of our paper writing options was to compare it to the "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech from Macbeth.  I think about that now.  Why invite students into existentialist angst when they are seniors in high school?  Or did he think we were there already and that he was simply giving us tools for expressing our languors with greater creativity?  My crush on him developed in part because one day after class he showed me some of his own poetry.  I felt like he was interested in me personally.

I feel mildly embarrassed even now at how transparently needy I was then.  Perhaps that's why I've not been able to have close relationships with students.  It always seems so fraught.

That neediness also drove my crush on Mr. Glasner.  He directed the senior play and oversaw the drama department at Los Gatos High.  He was also well known as an actor in local theatrical circles.  I took an acting class from him and under his direction played Helena in the senior play, Midsummer Night's Dream.  He had a flamboyant personality at a time when such a vibrancy made what we now call "affectional preference" questionable.  He was married, of course, but with those he trusted his conversation carried hints to sparkle a Bay Area kid's suburban gaydar.  Heck, our senior year variety show contained numbers from Cabaret and Gypsy (including "You Gotta Get a Gimmick!")  And I certainly owe him for introducing me to grand opera.  One day as some of us theater kids were hanging out in the auditorium at lunch time, he played the drinking song and "Sempra Libera" from La Traviata.  I have loved opera ever since.

I met with all three men occasionally in the years after high school.  While I was happy to be gone from my parent's house, I missed my town and teachers for a long time after I left.  But I have seen none of them for over 30 years.  Mr. Ridgely died in 2011.  His obituary is still up at the Mercury News obit site.  As for Mr. Glasner -- I found only a "death record" for a Joseph Glasner in Sunnyvale in 2005 that was roughly the correct age.  But I was also told of rumors of his death back in 2011 at our 40th Reunion.

While googling these men, I made the sort of startling discovery once reserved for folks mucking about in library stacks.  I found out that I actually saw Mr. Glasner for the first time in 1963 when I was in fifth grade.  My folks took me to a performance of Comedy of Errors at the Lifeboat Theatre in Santa Clara.  A quick search for Joseph Glasner in Newspapers.com showed me story from the Santa Cruz Sentinel noting that he was the Antipholous in that production!  So I first saw him when I saw my first full Shakespeare play!

And it was Mr. Glasner who cursed me with the words, spoken one day outside of our auditorium, "I promise you, you were born to be a teacher!"

And now he is gone, and Ridgely is gone, and most lately Mr. Barrans is gone.  All, all are gone, these men who were so important to my younger self. 

Professor Google allowed me to find a copy of one of the saddest short films ever made which suits my mood just fine.  This is  "Valse Triste" from Allegro Non Troppo.

48 "Love is a kind of war . . .

. . . and no assignment for cowards." 

Thus is Ovid's opening of the Ars Amatoria translated in Solomon and Higgins The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love.

Today in philosophy I talked about Publius Ovidius Naso and the context of love and marriage in early imperial Rome.  We also covered St. Paul's writings on marriage in First Corinthians, both the harsh and the beautiful. By harsh I mean his idea that people should be like him, celibate, and avoid any kind of sex (1 Corinthians 7).  By beautiful I mean first, his insistence that husbands and wives are equal in the giving and taking of sex (1 Corinthians 7).  And second, of course, I mean 1 Corinthians 13 which I can't read aloud without crying.  I said as much and a young man volunteered to finish the reading after I started to tear up.

Reading Ovid again made me think about my high school second and third year Latin teacher, Mr. Barrans.  I had such a huge crush on him, though as a youngster I did not perceive him as being a particularly good teacher.  He let people chatter in class and didn't keep us focused and task oriented.  I much preferred the tougher profs in those days.  But for some reason I became wild about him.  I can remember sitting next to him at an all school event in the gym and allowing the edge of my sandal to just barely touch the "waist" of his heavy black Oxford.  I became so turned on that I thought my head would explode.

Did he know I had a crush on him?  I don't remember whether or not I ever actually told him before I left school.  I do remember he gave me special assignments in translation.  He had me translating Catullus my junior year.  Did he say, "These might interest you?"  And that year he also occasionally let me have brief access to his classroom immediately after school so I could make-out with my senior class boyfriend for a few minutes in a "private" space.  During my own senior year, there was no actual fourth year Latin but I do remember taking a stab at both Ovid sexy poems and Virgil's Georgics and then finally giving up Latin.

Was it "right" for my Latin teacher to have me translating poems such as the one below?  As an old teacher now, I would say, "no."  But then I'm the kind of person who doesn't have personal relationships with students. Perhaps he thought he was reaching out to a trouble youth in the only "language" she knew.

Catullus 5

Vivamus mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
rumoresque senum severiorum
omnes unius aestimemus assis!
soles occidere et redire possunt:
nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda.
da mi basia mille, deinde centum,
dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,
deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum.
dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,
conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,
aut ne quis malus inuidere possit,
cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

LY #104 Not News

Sally-High School

Search term:  Sally Jane Hanson

As far as I know the deaths of my oldest sister and her daughter were never reported in a newspaper.  I would actually have to do some research, however, to be sure.  Visit the morgues of the Oakland Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, and San Jose Mercury News.  Or get access to their databases, if they have them.  A quick search of Newspapers.com under her maiden and married names revealed nothing.

This lack of information was made clear to me twice in the years afterwords.  In the summer of 1988, at the 100th Anniversary Celebration of Los Gatos High School, I ran into the man who taught her French back when she was in school in the early 60s.  I casually mentioned her passing.  He looked like I'd slapped him.  There in the midst of the celebration he sat down and began weeping.  Then, in 1991 after my mother's death I wrote in Mom's obituary that she was "preceded in death" by her daughter, Sally Jane Hanson.  A woman showed up late to the reception after my Mom's funeral mass and said that she had just driven an hour to be there not because she knew my mother but because she'd known Sally and was shocked that she was dead.

Why the lack of news about what, these days, would be considered content worthy?  Perhaps the old time professional courtesy that bound reporters and their police contacts were responsible for this lack of public information.  So I always assumed.  There's so much of this story that I "assumed" because I found it so difficult to talk with my parents about it.  And when I was able to talk with them the information they gave was limited both by their positions and by the ideology of their generation.

Here is what I remember about my first knowledge of this story.

The date is Sunday, February 28.   (I know this now because it was just before dress rehearsals of the LGHS senior play, Midsummer Night's Dream.  I have all my high school newspapers so I know the exact date of that show.)  I have just returned from meeting across town with the woman who is doing hair and make-up for the show.  She has set and styled my hair and taught my Mom and me how to get the pancake, blush and eyeliner on.  Since I rarely did anything with my hair or face, I am feeling giggly and goofy when I get home.   In my memory we arrive at almost the same time that my sister's husband, A--- and another man arrive at the house.

I notice that A--- has cut off both his beard and the hair that once touched his shoulders and make some loud laughing comment about his changed appearance.  The face he turns to me is that of a ghost.  It's empty of everything except darkness.  I feel afraid and know that something is wrong.  I am sent to my room for a short time.

A few minutes later Dad and Mom call me into the living room.  Is my younger sister there?  It seems so but frankly, I'm not sure.  What I remember is looking at A--- and the gray light of late afternoon streaming in through the venetian blinds.  There is something big now sitting inside my chest pressing hard my breastbone.  I already want to be somewhere else.

Then someone, probably my mother, told me, told us, that my oldest sister had attempted suicide and succeeded in killing her 18 month old child.

What words were used?  I don't remember.  For years I remembered hearing that my sister had used a broken bottle on herself and her child.  But this wasn't the case.  In the early part of this Century I met again with my ex-brother-in-law and found out that Sally had indeed slit her wrists.  Then she smothered her child to death.  Also, while bleeding, she made a phone call to my mother during which she had the usual "how's-your-day-going-just-fine-thanks" conversation.

This first suicide attempt was not successful.  Her husband found her and she survived, saving him from being charged with the deaths of his wife and child, though not from a long night of police interrogation.  His release marked one small escape from the collateral damage resulting from her terrible actions.