- Washington Island, WI and Needham, MAWhen attending public school at Sunrise Elementary in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, my Catholic parochial school friends told me about nuns who regularly rapped knuckles with rulers when students didn't pay attention.
Yet, from my experience there would not be any teacher to compare with Mae Minor, my fourth grade teacher. She kept me in from recess several days in a row while I was made to buckle down on my arithmetic problems. Actually, I thought I had been doing quite well in arithmetic as well as other subjects- average or better at least- but according to this thick-rouged biddy I "...had a long way to go" to match my sister, Helen.
One grade ahead of me, Helen was on the jungle bars having a great time with her friends just outside the fourth grade room windows, while my mind tried to grasp elusive multiplication tables. But, rather than kissing up to someone whose perfumed presence made her smell like a flower pot, I felt indignant. This spinster had no right to make me suffer for her inability to teach.
All of us kids knew Miss Minor, with thick eyeglasses fastened to a neck chain, her hair wound in a topknot with a clasp holding the bun tightly at the back of her head, could never attract a husband. She was lucky to have her cats for companions, we knew, given a face that would scare youngsters. Her demeanor wasn't fit for raising kids. She rarely smiled, other than to impart smugness. Miss Minor had perfected her strut, nose in the air as she moved slowly between aisles of our classroom, a flowery, lace edged hanky stuffed fashionably, for her, up her dress sleeve.
In her 48th year of teaching in 1957 when I had the misfortune of being her pupil, Miss Minor lived on her reputation. Looking back, I think the school principal, Mr. Matzke, and even the school board, whoever they were, feared her and were afraid to do anything but let her complete her fifty years. And this she did, earning a front-page, glowing description about this teacher of hundreds of students, this educator daughter of Judge Edwin Minor, one of Sturgeon Bay's most illustrious figures from the early 1900's. The newspaper article went overboard to be kind, I thought, because there must have been dozens of others in my same shoes, wrongly kept in from recess.
Later, as a high school senior jogging up Michigan St. to the running track, I still shuddered slightly when I passed Mae Minor's home, that run-down Victorian Judge Minor built with the curtains drawn, with the audacious porch and huge pines, now heavy-limbed and long since overgrown. Perhaps her corpulent body lay deep on a velvet sofa with her pet cats all around, I thought, slowly becoming mummified as I enjoyed my various measures of success in higher grades of education, no thanks to Mae Minor.
From trauma to delight!
Fast forward to last Saturday, April 25, when Mary Jo and I traveled to Boston for the funeral of friend Bernie Jacobson. The church was Needham's First Parish, with a record dating back to the early 1700's, a simple and beautiful church.
As the service began, I read the plaque on the wall to our right that listed the many pastors who served the First Parish pulpit over the centuries. Last on the list was a Dr. John A. Buehrens who arrived at First Parish in 2002. I passed a note to Mary Jo that read, "I knew a John Buehrens in 2nd grade. He went to Harvard. His father worked for R.A. Stearn." R.A. Stearn Naval Architects and Engineering was where my father also worked for many years, and their design office was located in the main fabrication and management offices of the former Leathem Smith Shipyard in Sturgeon Bay, which in the 1950's had become the Christy Corporation, also a shipbuilder.
After the funeral service, I approached the pastor and asked if he had lived in Sturgeon Bay in his youth? And was his father in shipbuilding? It turned out I was wrong about Dr. Buehren's father working for R.A. Stearn (he worked for Christy Corporation) but I had guessed correctly about John, a former Sunrise Elementary classmate!
Here was the same John Buehrens I remembered comparing my stamp collection with in third grade. At the time I ordered glassine envelopes of stamps for fifty cents each from comic book ads. Some were triangular stamps with exotic illustrations, from places I had no idea existed. On one Saturday morning in the mid-1950's at John's home, I learned where San Marino and Cameroon and Nicaragua were, those countries with really cool stamps.
John knew stamps. He knew their value, their origin, and other minutiae that obviously helped him to skip fourth grade and Miss Mae Minor. His traveling orders took him directly from Mrs. Johnson's third grade class across the hall where the "little kids" were, past Miss Minor's dungeon, to the kind Miss Long's fifth grade. Then, as I set my stamp collection aside, hoping it would gain value, and started to get the hang of baseball, John's father took a job with George Steinbrenner's American Shipbuilding as fleet manager. His family moved from Sturgeon Bay after John's fifth grade year, and there was no more thought of John Buehrens except for an occasional bit of correspondence shared between his and my parents. That must be how I knew he jumped from third to fifth, and just as quickly it seemed, to Harvard.
Actually, John told me he graduated from high school at age 16, perhaps too young an age, and he entered Harvard. He sold his stamp collection to help pay for graduate credits. A few years later, he earned his doctorate in divinity from Harvard. Then he trained as a pastor, serving in many different churches, and as the national leader of the Unitarian Universalist Association in America, he traveled the country from 1993 to 2001.
The coincidence of meeting someone I had forgotten about years ago made that day in Needham even more special than it was already. John and I briefly reconnected on our family histories, parting with the possibility that some day we may meet again.
John may not realize it, but I know, that a major part of his scholastic success can be owed to the fateful decision to put him ahead a grade, supported most likely by parents who had the astuteness to keep him from the Mae Minor snake pit.
- Dick Purinton
