What's in a Name?

    Other than being an important piece of my development as a person and a teacher, and some nominal connections to current faculty, especially those who are also former students, I really feel little connection to The Place any longer. That’s kind of sad, I guess, and was perhaps unnecessary, but it’s hardly a feeling that presents any danger of my spiraling into an abyss. My exit turned out to be a blessing. (Details elsewhere on this blog)

    But I’ve noticed a change that, well, irks is too strong so let’s just say bothers me. The high school I loved has changed its name. Okay, it probably didn’t change itself, being an inanimate object, even if one imbued with a soul. Somebody decided it should no longer be Hancock High School, but Hancock Place High School. 

    As proud as I am of what a dedicated group of teachers accomplished there during those four decades, as previously noted I have little connection and even less influence over these things, so I can assure you I’m neither losing (even a little) sleep nor preparing one last charge at a windmill.

     Still, here’s the thing. The DISTRICT is Hancock Place, a moniker attached because its namesake, the esteemed Civil War general, W.S. Hancock, donated land for the first school. When people asked about the school’s location, they were told, "It’s down by the old Hancock place," directions apparently good enough for the time before Siri and Alexa. 

    As the area population grew and schools multiplied, they were all named for the general, plus political/geographic markers. The elementary schools were Hancock Wards 1, 2 & eventually 3. The junior high was Hancock Junior High. When the high school first came into being, closing in on about 150 years ago, it was named Hancock High School, a pretty good legacy for a man who ran for president and lost. How many other losers have that many schools named for them? 

    Don’t believe me? Just look at the picture at the top of the blog. Revisionist history is all the rage, I know, but I spent my 37 years at HANCOCK HIGH SCHOOL in the School District of Hancock Place, NOT at Hancock Place High School in the Hancock Place School District. I’m not thrilled about having that history, and by extension, my history, erased because, well, maybe there is a reason, but I can’t (or won’t) come up with one that I am going to agree qualifies as GOOD!

Just a Riff on Place Names

Imagine my surprise when I learned that the Hancock in Hancock Place wasn’t Founding Father (and noted smuggler, rabble rouser, and black-marketeer) John, but Winfield Scott, the Civil War General who was the beneficiary of the ill-fated charge at Gettysburg from his former best friend, General George Pickett of the CSA. (Modern conspiracy buffs would no doubt suggest, and have the “fact” go viral via social media, that the fix was in and Pickett didn’t really die but lived out his life comfortably in Iowa or somewhere.)

But I digress. So the namesake of the School District of Hancock Place was General Winfield Scott Hancock, apparently the only person of note to come from the area, or at least have an interest in education, because the subsequent elementary schools were named, 1, 2, and 3 (surpassing Dr. Seuss's Thing 1 and Thing 2 by 50%), and thus ensuring that the Hancock name wouldn’t be overshadowed by some Johnny-Come-Lately.

Not to be outdone, the junior high was named, yes, Junior High and, when it came into being in the mid-20's, the high school was named, wait for it, High School. All to honor a guy who ran for president — and lost. Following tradition, when the three elementary schools were merged at the old Mt. St. Rose Hospital/Sanitarium in the 80’s, it was christened, naturally, Hancock Elementary.

You may wonder where the “Place” came from in Hancock Place, how a district populated with salt-of-the-earth families ended up with such a snooty name. General Hancock donated the site of the original school, on Military, and, as schools were wont to do at the time, it became kind of the center of the community. Hancock was a celebrity (even if he didn’t run for President as a Missouri favorite son), so, when people asked for directions to the school, they were told it was down by the old Hancock Place. Ta-dah!

(Oh, and according to my father, Mehlville had nothing to do with the author, which makes sense because they are spelled differently, and should be pronouced Mail-ville, he having been friends with progeny of the Mehl family. Without contradicting him I did suggest that this might an instance of where being right didn’t keep people from looking at you funny.)

Thanks. I’m here all week. Tell your friends.

Landing the Hancock Gig

How I came to Hancock, a district I had never heard of, is a curious story.

As noted elsewhere, I was, at best, a mediocre college student. My paper (transcript) was not pretty and I was not a particularly attractive candidate for a teaching position. In fact, my GPA wouldn’t qualify, under today’s standards, for admission to a school of education in Missouri.

However, one advantage of changing majors as often as I did was that I had, or was close to, numerous certifications. I received a call from Hancock about an opening for a combo English-French position. Did I have, or could I complete, those certifications? (My BA was in history.) Hmmm, maybe I couldn’t have been admitted to UMSL’s school of education even then. Not why I took the path to the profession I did, however (certification, not a BS-Ed). It had been only about 3-4 semesters previous to that, while still pursuing a double major in French and history, that I told an UMSL French professor, “I don’t know what I’m going to do [with my French degree], but it won’t be teaching!”

In any case, “Yes,” I said, I could gain those certifications, even if I didn’t have them quite yet. Fortunately, Washington University had double summer sessions, allowing me to earn the 12 credit hours I still needed. I had used up UMSL’s French department (no courses left), so Wash U. was the only option. I took a couple lower level grammar courses to get my 30 hours.

I also took English classes from two memorable teachers: a drama class from Herb Metz, who did theater reviews for one of the local TV stations, and an independent study composition course from Benetta Jackson, the head of their English department and author of a composition textbook. In our first meeting, she had me write an essay, then said, “Okay, you can write, you don’t need a composition class,” (except for certification), tossed her plans, and we started talking each week about teaching English to high school students. Years later, I used her book as my guide when I began the college composition class in the mid-80s (originally through MO-Bap). I am forever in her debt.

As it turned out, unknown to me, I had a Hancock connection. My father, who grew up on Idaho Ave. in the Carondolet neighborhood before I-55 took the house, had a best friend named Francis Bentrup, a (former) Hancock school board member. When my dad learned I had a scheduled interview at Hancock, he asked me if I wanted him to call his friend, and I reluctantly agreed that it couldn’t hurt. I certainly had no other prospects. Mr. Bentrup, in turn, called his good friend, board member Earl Muelfarth. Yes, that was his real name and the irony of his lobbying for me will manifest itself in a future chapter.

Even so, the route to the job began inauspiciously. First, I got lost on the way to the interview. (No Google maps or Siri – who knew that Ripa had more non-connecting segments than a geometry problem?) When, in a panic, I called the late Bernice Warren from a pay phone, she laughed understandingly (“Happens all the time.”) and directed me to the Conn-cottage we later referred to as the Little House on the Prairie, where I briefly, very briefly, met Superintendent Veryl B. Young.

Despite my best efforts to ask questions and prolong the interview, I was shown the door in about 5 minutes (The three women hired that year for English positions had much longer, more probative meetings on, uh, wide-ranging topics, sexual harassment not having been invented yet.) and sent on my way to Rich Eichhorst at the high school. My interview at the high school was more productive, even if my memory says we spent more time comparing notes on being married to nurses than anything else. Not the last time being married to Carolyn benefitted me.

Maybe that dual certification was rare enough that there weren’t any better candidates, but the more likely explanation: Who you know, who you know, who you know. Still, I like to think it all worked out.

Setting the stage with some background. What we English teacher types call "Exposition."

Getting Started

Unlike today, teachers weren’t expected to attend a week’s worth (or more) of pre-service training. I think there were a couple or three very casual days of meetings prior to school starting. However, the new kids (and there were four new English teachers that year) were expected to come in a week prior to that for district and/or building orientation.

But I was so excited that I showed up at Principal Richard Eichhorst’s office a week earlier even than that. I thought I’d check out my room, get the text books, start prepping, you know, teacher stuff.

Lena Dugan ushered me into his office where, blinking, he said, “You’re not supposed to be here ‘til next week.” I told him I knew that, but thought I’d at least get the textbooks I was going to use and check out my room.

With a noticeable lack of enthusiasm,  he walked me over to Room 200 (West Wing, southern corner, next to Bill Moody’s library office) and opened the door with his skeleton key. Apparently that room was being used as a “stuff repository” for anything and everything that arrived over the summer. Even then I knew I had no chance of ever winning any kind of “Best Room Decoration” prize, but clearly I wasn’t going to get much of a head start on overcoming what would be a career-long area of mediocrity. He did start to rip an old telephone cable off the wall -- but not completely, so it was kind of left hanging for maintenance to figure out. “We’re going to work on getting this stuff out of here,” he said.

Oh, okay, what about books I asked? They were upstairs (in the old library book room, where, according to legend, the previous librarian had refused to check out her books for fear students might lose them) but he said he didn’t know which ones I’d be using. “We’ll figure that out next week,” he said. We did (another story), but he wasn’t part of the we.

I returned home and tried, unsuccessfully (my legendary nervousness to begin every year is also another story for another time), to relax for another week. 

Note: Entries will not necessarily be in any kind of order, chronological or otherwise. Given the traffic generated just by the introduction, I’m just going to go with what’s ready!

Introduction

It was about this time in 1971 that I was trying to get ready to start the adventure that became my teaching career. That career sent me to places I could never have imagined, introduced me to people of such diversity that I will never be the same, and made me a better person. 

Perhaps that journey is not yet finished; perhaps it will never finish. But it began in a small inner ring suburban district in South St. Louis County that was bordered by the Mississippi, River Des Peres (really more of a drainage ditch than a river), Interstate 55 and other, seemingly random, border lines. I had never heard of it, a K-12 district that always totaled fewer than 2000 students, K-12.

This new blog will reflect my memories of those times. I stress that these will be MY memories, and yours of the same time and events may be different, because we all view the past (and even the present and future) through our own lenses. 

It is not meant to be self-congratulatory, nor to solicit compliments or gratitude. Neither is it meant to dredge up painful memories or settle scores (of which I have almost none, quite frankly). Feel free to follow or comment or ignore. Like most of what I write, this is for my own satisfaction and amusement.

The story of my years at Hancock, this collection of random memories that float around in my brain and bubble to the surface for seemingly no particular reason, will always be, at its heart, a story of love and gratitude.