LAST YEARS AT EASTERN HANCOCK, 1973-74
On the last night of “Hello, Dolly!” there was a group of people who could not get in due to the sell-out but who wouldn’t leave. Finally, they were allowed to stand at the back. Due to an unforeseeable, potentially tragic accident in which one of our close, dear friends from the Zapf family was trapped in their grain bin and in danger of suffocating. He was being rescued as those dear family members stood by in helpless terror. At intermission, the standees in the audience were allowed to take those empty seats.
A year passed, and when, at the end of the school year, I sought to tender my resignation to go into business, the principal talked me into delaying my decision for a year. (Principals really should advise teachers in such instances to take a year’s leave of absence rather than resign.) He said the school board had told him, "Well, Ed, your job is to talk him out of it!" I’m sure that Leon Wilson had told them my comment from the last time I had left. That was all it took. I postponed my leaving for a year—a very important year in the scheme of my teaching life.
During that year I changed my teaching style. I relaxed. I expressed my feelings of friendship more readily with the kids I worked with after school nearly every day. I took off my toupee when my scalp began to sweat and put it back on in time for play practice. One evening as I was putting it back on, someone said, “Mr. Rhoades, maybe I’m speaking out of turn, but I like the way you look better without that thing.” And I left it off for good. Also, I removed some of the artificial barriers I had erected for self-protection. I was in my mid-thirties by then, and they were no longer necessary. And if I wasn’t going to teach any more, why should I be in fear of a mysterious “somebody” lurking in the shadows to discredit me and cost me my job. Hey, America” Don’t you realize that you require more and more performance from teachers and you are giving them less and less protection as children get more and more street wise? I always knew, and twice in my teaching days I experienced the ramifications of it, that one angry student who sets out to discredit you can soon enlist the aid of his/her parents and their connections. Anyway, I felt I had arrived at a point where I could be more free (not loose—I wouldn’t know how to do that).
Our big show the year before had been Brigadoon with Jeanie Crider and Laura Jarrett playing opposite Jeff Hewson. As we were cleaning up from scenery work and preparing for rehearsal to begin, the stage door opened and Laura, ghostly pale, ran into my arms crying, “Oh, Mr. Rhoades, I had a wreck!” Then she was unconscious as I lifted and I carried her down the long hallway to the sick room where I called for an ambulance and notified her parents. Neighbors told me that they had approached her to offer help, but she screamed hysterically and ran from them as if she thought they intended to harm her. Somehow things like this and the tornado that hit the next year work to draw a teacher more closely into the community.
That was also the year that Jeff Hewson went off to college. He was a handsome kid who had had an operation to correct a club foot pitch when he appeared at his first tryout and pitch problems when I first cast him in a leading role, that of Tommy in Brigadoon. I remember that I would often stand behind him in rehearsals and try to be inconspicuous when I sang along softly to keep him on a truer pitch. By performance, he was very good, and no one mentioned pitch problems—mostly they said, “Wow, Jack, I never realized Jeff Hewson was so darn good lookin‘!” When he returned the next year, he sang even better because he had begun to sing at weddings and to have other opportunities to use his voice. Jerry Davis and Steve Harding, for example, were so busy with athletics and editing the yearbook, etc., that they didn’t sing from one musical to the next although they had natural gifts. When I was called to the phone at school one day, I was surprised by Jeff’s calling to say that he had “made” the Purdue Glee Club. “I wanted you to be the first to know, because you are the person who taught me to sing.” (Well, I drafted him into it anyway.) That was the first year that the Purdue Glee Club was featured at Radio City Music Hall where they were a sensation for several years. I have lost track of Jeff since he left the QVC shopping network on TV. I used to turn it on every once in a while for a few minutes just to feel as if we had had a visit.
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I also should mention Ronnie Breece, who died some years back in an auto accident. Ronnie was small of stature, but he played with enormous heart. He was a champion wrestler in the lightest weight class, senior class president, and working so many hours a day that he fell asleep on the carpeted aisle between his scenes when he played the role of Scrooge in the first musical on the new stage. In addition to Pappy Yokum, which we brought him from the junior high to do because Danny Cupp was hospitalized, he was a wonderful Artful Dodger in the production on the small stage at the end of an old gym where Darlene Speer, Steve Harding (as Bill Sikes), Jerry and Ronnie got our first standing response.
Once when we were preparing To Kill a Mockingbird and Ronnie was playing the villain, Mr. Ewell, I invited Penny Riddle, an African-American friend with a theater background to a rehearsal to advise me on sensitive racial matters. Ronnie could hardly get out the vile epithets with her there, and I told her that. She said, “I LOVE that kid. When I first saw him as Scrooge, I thought, ‘Am I supposed to scale down my thinking to that degree?’ But by the time he began to leap and cavort, I had completely forgotten his size. He just mesmerizes you.”
One of the things a director treasures about an actor is having his/her complete trust. During Mr. Scrooge a young teacher offered to help out and began to attend rehearsals. Scrooge had a line in a song that referred to himself, once he had been transformed into a dancing dervish, as “the fairy on top of the tree.” Suzanne took me aside and informed me that we just had to change that lyric. “How about “the angel on top of the tree?” I stopped the song and relayed the message to Scrooge himself. “Well, Mr. Rhoades, what do you think? It doesn’t bother me.” And as I found it rather more delightful, we left it in. I loved his willingness to do that for me.
pretty cool. I had you as a teacher at ehhs. I even did a few fill in bits in the plays when you were desperate for bodies. I found this site by accident. I enjoyed reading your stories. I did not know you enjoyed writing.
I have positive comments for five teachers/administrators in the EHHS system. You are one of the five. Good Job Mr Rhoades
If you told me what plays you were in, I’m sure I’d remember you. And I’d love to read about those five teachers.
Brandt, Hopkins, Wampler, Rhoades, Webb. Surprised? These teachers worked to produce good students, not to be “good teachers”
Today is my lucky day! I found your website! I am not able to spend much time surfing the internet as I work full time, am a nursing student part time, and a homemaker and wife the rest of the time! I had just taken a few minutes to look at Facebook and there you were in Alice Widvey Cooley’s responses…it gave joy to my heart! Aren’t we so fortunate to be able to have this social network tool as we get older and less able to fly around and see other we used to know? I read several of your website posts and all of a sudden, my “little life” in Charlottesville became more eventful, and somehow more exciting.
I now believe I was blessed to be raised in the rural part of our state, with fields to wander, dusty roads to my friends’ homes, and teachers that knew my name, my brother’s and sisters’ names, where I lived, who my parents were and on and on. So few people have had that experience and it made me very grounded and able to deal with the blows of life. I lost one of my precious sons when he was eighteen and at college. He went into a diabetic coma, caused by an infection of some sort, and died within 4 hours. He was in Chicago at St Xavier’s University and loving life! My husband and I weren’t there as he took his last breaths, and believe me, it has taken every minute of the past seven years to get ourselves back to an even keel. But thanks to the fact that when I was a child, I saw animals and people die as a natural part of living, and I had people to remind me that life had worth and that it was important that I keep living no matter how heavy the burden, I have arrived on a different level of life. Will my life ever be the same? Of course not…he was far too much of a life force for us to ever say my life will be the same, but as he has reminded us in his own ways, we must keep going as it was only his work that was done, not ours.
You played a part in that. I wasn’t in Drama Club, but your classes were so different that Miss Harlan’s English classes. I bless her memory as well, because I needed that structure, but I also needed to know that talent comes in all forms and that a grown teacher can be as free flowing and witty as you were (and are!) and still teach us important life lessons. I still cannot read “Our Town” without dissolving into tears.
Now,when I am fortunate enough to have the chance, I try to thank those who played a part in making me strong enough to last through what life has held. Consider yourself thanked!! I appreciate the time you spent, overworked and underpaid, to help to reasssure a skinny girl from Charlottesville that she, too, would make a contribution to the world.