Until now I’ve avoided the debate over arming teachers in classrooms for some excellent reasons.

One is that few things are more inflammatory in idaho than the gun-control debate. My last foray into that quagmire ended with a fellow panelist taking a swing at me on public television. And he was the pro gun-control panelist, the alleged pacifist.

Another reason is that my experience with guns is pretty much limited to blasting away in my teenage years at jackrabbits, game birds and, on one memorable occasion, my neighbor’s hunting dog. In my defense, the dog was hidden by brush and looked exactly like a pheasant.

I do have considerable experience with teachers, however, including being married to one. And it occurs to me that one aspect of the debate over arming teachers has been overlooked.

What if the teacher is a nut job? We rightly worry about armed intruders in our schools, but what’s to prevent an armed teacher from going over the edge?

In saying this, I mean no disrespect to the majority of teachers who are stable, competent individuals. If all teachers were like Mr. Borque, for example, the argument to arm teachers would make a lot more sense.

Mr. Borque was the American Government  teacher and football coach at our school. He was built like a linebacker and looked like a Marine sharpshooter, which for all we knew he may once have been. One look at an armed Mr. Borque would have sent a would-be shooter fleeing in terror. And in the event of a shootout, there isn’t the slightest doubt who would have prevailed. If Mr. Borque had been at the Dallas School Book Depository on Nov. 22, 1963, JFK would be retired and living happily on his book royalties now.

Mr. Borque, however, was an exception. The majority of my teachers, from first grade through college, were, shall we say, ill-suited for armed combat. And a few were absolute loonies.

Before rebelling against a decade of parochial education and switching with two friends to public high school, I attended schools staffed almost entirely by nuns. Some were gifted teachers and kind, gentle souls. This was in the days, however, when their less than kindly colleagues inflicted discipline that today would be illegal. Sister Brutus, for example. (That’s not her real name; if I used her real name, she’d track me down and beat the living daylights out of me.)

Sister Brutus had what she quaintly referred to as a “boo-boo stick.” Made of heavy plywood, it had a face with tears painted on the business end. If you screwed up in class – and it didn’t take much – she put a check after your name on the chalkboard. Each check represented a lively whack with the boo-hoo stick after school. The more checks, the more whacks.

One boy in our class amassed an astonishing number of checks almost every day. It wasn’t that he was such a horrible kid; I think he just rubbed her the wrong way. Every night after school, he was whacked, and whacked and whacked some more. He rarely cried, probably due to the calluses.

God knows what would have happened if Sister Brutus had been armed with a .38 instead of a boo-hoo stick. She might have winged the poor kid for good measure.

Sister Screwloose seemed outwardly normal, even fun-loving, until the day she found out that one of the boys in our class had invited one of the girls over for Sunday dinner with his family. We were then in sixth grade, and to her way of thinking this was the equivalent of one of the boys inviting a girl over for a spirited orgy.

Instead of the usual classroom routine, she devoted the entire day to making fun of the youthful “offenders.” We were encouraged to draw cartoons of them and write things about them on the chalkboard. Everyone seemed to know it was wrong but her. The next day, at the request of their parents, the principal, the pastor and quite possibly the pope, she apologized profusely. The apology was heartfelt, heartbreaking. We were sorry for her. But we were sorrier for those two kids.

The following year, another breakdown. Two of the class troublemakers drove our seventh-grade teacher berserk. She was escorted from the school babbling. We never saw her again. I hate to think what might have happened if either of those women had had revolvers instead of rosaries hanging from their belts.

The same went for Mr. Jitters, one of my teachers at Boise High School. The man was terminally nervous. One of the class clowns exploited his agitation by playing one of those tasteless jokes that only high school boys found funny. He slipped the textbook out of the projector Mr. Jitters was using to highlight passages on a movie screen and replaced it with a Playboy centerfold. When the resulting snickers caused him to turn around and see what his pointer was pointing at, he turned a deep shade of red and wordlessly left the room. A substitute teacher replaced him for the rest of the week.

Years later, I happened to run into Mr. Jitters. He said he was never comfortable teaching and had left the profession for another line of work. I didn’t ask him whether he’d have felt more comfortable if he’d been packing heat. Given his shaky condition, a scary thought.

My English teacher at Boise High School taught us the finer points of usage and passed on her love of literature to those who were susceptible. She was a good teacher, but she was old and frail. It was all she could do to climb the stairs to her classroom. Somehow I can’t see her strapping on a Glock before setting off to work in her Rambler every morning. Or fending off a burly student bent on stealing her piece.

One of my foreign language teachers at the University of Idaho was as excitable as he was inspiring. It was nothing for him to climb on top of his desk, wave his arms and jump up and down. If he’d been wearing a gun, he could have shot himself in the foot.

Another of my college teachers could have posed for a Norman Rockwell painting of a kindly college professor – tweed jacket, bow tie, twinkling blue eyes. He was wise and gentle, universally loved. He could have been armed with every weapon imaginable, and I  don’t think he could have hurt anyone.

Strict gun control laws like those adopted in some countries will probably never happen here. But it’s hard to believe that our best minds can’t come up with a better response to Newtown than strapping guns on the mixed bag of individuals who teach our children. If good is to come of the tragedy, it will be that it leads to a civil discourse and finding a middle ground that reduces the likelihood of future tragedies.

That will be mainly up to the members of Congress – who aren’t known for harmonious relations. Let’s hope they don’t vote to arm themselves.

 

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in the  Statesman’s Life section and is posted on http://www.woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com

 

With due respect for Time magazine and Barack Obama, my Person of the Year for 2012 is Dorothy Peachock.

Who is Dorothy Peachock?

Good question. She is, among other things, the only Dorothy Peachock in the United States. More importantly, to me at least, she and her husband, Phil Peachock, are the owners of a music store in Kent, Ohio. Or at least they were until recently.

Spin-More Records closed last spring, when a franchise sandwich shop offered to pay more rent for the space. Familiar story: a beloved local institution is forced out for a cookie-cutter franchise. At least one customer, according to a local news report, wept at the news.

The silver lining, for me and no doubt for other record shoppers, is that Spin-More is selling some of its massive inventory, assembled over 30 years, online. And one of those records – the only one for sale in the U.S., incidentally – was a record I’ve wanted forever.

The package, stamped with Dorothy’s name and address, arrived just in time for Christmas. Opening the carefully packed box, I momentarily succumbed to doubts. Could it really be the right record? Decades had passed since I’d even seen it. Maybe I’d remembered the title incorrectly. Or the artist.

I hadn’t. One look at the jacket and the doubts were gone. It was the right record, all right _ “Christmas Joy,” by George Melachrino and his orchestra, recorded in 1958 “in living stereo.” The Christmas album of my childhood, the best Christmas album ever.

My sister, who was a decade older than me, bought it at the old C.C. Anderson’s store, later Macy’s, in downtown Boise. It immediately became a family favorite. I used to spend hours just looking at the jacket photo, a nighttime shot of a postcard-perfect mountain cabin all but buried in powder snow, gigantic icicles on its eaves illuminated by its golden-glowing windows. It was probably taken in Vermont or Colorado, but I was an impressionable kid who dreamed of skiing in the Swiss Alps and was enamored of all things Swiss. Anyplace that picturesque had to be in Switzerland.

It was the music, though, that made the record special.

“Listen to ‘Jingle Bells’,” my sister said. “It sounds like sled dogs whining on a cold winter night.”

It wasn’t sled dogs; it was bassoons. But she was right. With a little imagination, they did sound like sled dogs. “Jingle Bells” has never been one of my favorite carols. But I like that “Jingle Bells” a lot.

The thing that made “Christmas Joy” different from most Christmas records was that much of it wasn’t Christmas melodies at all. A carol might begin with a familiar tune, then transition to an original phrase or lush orchestral passage that had no earthly business in a Christmas carol, except to make it unpredictable and beautiful. The album kept and held your interest with unconventional instrumentation, chord changes and twists of melodies where you least expected them. More than half a century has passed since it was recorded, and I’ve yet to hear another Christmas album like it.

Looking back, I think some of the happiest times in my life were spent listening to that old record. It wasn’t just the music – though that was a big part of its appeal – it was the times of which it was  part. Think Jean Shepherd’s “A Christmas Story.” BB guns or model trains in carefully wrapped packages under the tree, old-fashioned Christmas lights glowing in a darkened room, extra fuses in the kitchen cupboard.

Every December, my grandmother Susie would come and stay for a week or more. Like the Christmas album, she was a family favorite. She’d outlived three husbands, three of her four children and had three homes burn, yet somehow remained the most jovial person we knew. Christmas wouldn’t have been Christmas without her.

Her arrival invariably launched a baking frenzy. She and my mother and sister spent entire days in the kitchen, making pies, fudge, Christmas cookies, old-fashioned fruitcake … Being a boy and too young to be of much use anyway, I’d hunker down in the corner by the heat register and enjoy the results. Homemade Christmas treats, a Hardy Boys mystery, “Christmas Joy” on the stereo — it didn’t get much better than that.

My sister loved that old record so much that she kept it for more than 30 years. (She also liked it so much that even the most delicately worded suggestion that it would make a fine Christmas gift for her little brother was brusquely rejected.) Eventually it disappeared, as records will, its whereabouts becoming a mystery.

By then I’d made a cassette tape of it, but the tape faithfully reproduced every skip and scratch. Then the tape deck broke. I considered getting a new one, but this is the digital age. Ask about tape decks at an electronics store and the clerks will look at you like you had three heads.

Annual  attempts to find the album online failed. Only this year did I learn why. For some reason (perhaps because it was what was scrawled on the cassette tape box), I thought the album had been recorded by Hugo Winterhalter and his orchestra. Hugo was indeed an orchestra conductor of that era and had recorded several Christmas albums, but not “Christmas Joy,” which was why my searches came up empty. Only this month, when it occurred to me to search without using Hugo’s name, did I get lucky and find Dorothy.

The record she carefully boxed and shipped from Ohio was in remarkably good shape for as old as it is, but it still had some pops and scratches. Don Cunningham, an audio-wizard friend,  removed them on a CD he burned for me, making the long-dead George Melachrino and his orchestra sound good as new. The CD played non-stop on Christmas Eve while the kids and grandkids opened their gifts. Now it’s a favorite with a new generation.

It’s funny how things from your childhood occasionally come back to you, making them more dear than ever. I can’t say that old record is the best Christmas present I ever got. In the sense that I bought it myself, it wasn’t a present at all. And the best Christmas present I ever got, or ever will get, was a guitar I’d ordered and been making payments on for over a year. My parents secretly paid the balance and had it waiting on Christmas morning. No gift before or since has been as beautiful.

“Christmas Joy” wasn’t in the same league as that, or maybe even a Red Ryder BB Gun.

But it was close.

Thanks, Dorothy.

 

Tim Woodward’s column appears in the Statesman’s Life section every other Sunday and is posted on http://www.woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com