I Loved To Teach

At Carthage I had given selflessly of my time and energy, and as Margaret was always at my side when she wasn’t working at being a first-grade teacher, that meant that she also gave tirelessly. We became youth directors at Fletcher Methodist Church in addition to our many responsibilities at the school. We attended nearly all sporting events, and I even chaperoned the Future Farmers of America club initiation at the principal’s insistence because no one else would do it. The club sponsor left town that night on “business.” As I recall it was on a Friday night just before Thanksgiving, and I told Mr. Brenton, the principal, that it was the first night since school began that I had not had an obligation with school kids. I had promised to take my wife on a date. The second time he broached the subject he said, “Yesterday I asked you if you would chaperone this event. Today I am telling you to do it.” Little wonder that when we went to the basketball sectional in Rushville, the county seat, as teachers from Charlottesville, our entrance was announced to the crowd by a Carthage cheer that went, “Yea, rah, Mr. Rhoades—some teacher!” (It was a yell given after every score for our team that named the player and his grade in school, as in “Yea, rah, Smith—some senior!”)

This yell followed us to Charlottesville and greeted our arrival at every away game. Few teachers ever went to away games, but it never failed to embarrass us a bit, which just egged them on. It never stopped making us feel glad to be loyal fans.

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During my fourth year of teaching—the first at Charlottesville (later renamed Eastern Hancock)—it began to cross my mind that I might leave teaching. There were several factors of influence. Bob Kendall was the minister of the East Street Christian Church in Carthage. He was attending Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis. At that time CTS was on the Butler University campus, and it was well-known that the seminary sported a fully-equipped TV studio, which in 1961 was a rare thing. We went to the Methodist church, where the Kentucky-born minister was from an orientation far different from mine at Central Evangelical United Brethren Church in downtown South Bend, Indiana, or from Margaret’s in the small E.U.B. church in the little town of Harlem, Montana.

The day that stands out most was not an average Sunday, but it brought to a head what I had been feeling almost every Sunday morning at Fletcher Methodist Church in Carthage. The minister was ill-at-ease, loud, and hard-to-follow. He lacked any of the polish of the city ministers I had known. On this particular Sunday, one of my students, a talented red-haired freshman named Lynn Kennedy, was at the organ. I knew that he sometimes baby-sat for the parsonage family and knew his way around their abode.

Near the end of the service, there was a baptism ceremony, the sprinkling of two very young Winters boys. The minister welcomed them, spoke to the congregation, and, moving to the left of the sanctuary, removed the lid of the baptismal font. He registered a look of consternation, replaced the lid, and hurried up the levels of the choir loft to the organist, who faced the congregation from the center of the top level. He whispered something to the young man, whose face turned that crimson that only a red-head could display so well. It was obvious that he was trying desperately to decline the invitation, but the frenzied reverend would not be dissuaded. Lynn ran from the sanctuary.

I imagine the minister soon realized his second mistake. In sending the organist on the errand, he had removed the only smooth way of filling the lengthening gap—with a hymn. Puzzled, we waited in awkward amazement until Lynn returned with a fruit jar containing unholy, ungloriified tap water. There was, needless to say, a feeling of disbelief as Rev. Mayfield emptied the jar into the baptismal font. He then took the first boy in his arms, performed the rite very precisely and offered to return him to his father in exchange for the second boy. Much whispering ensued—he had baptized the infant using his brother’s name and would have to start again…

Finally, the service was over. I don’t think I discussed the matter with Margaret at the time, but I consciously decided that there was a real need in the ministry for men who planned ahead for details and remained cool in front of an audience. Besides, I was an accomplished speaker, and, most importantly, I would have time to read something other than student themes, term papers, and plays suitable for a class play. When the Charlottesville Christian Church announced a vacancy after my first year at that town’s small school, I decided to try out for it and, if selected, to continue my education at CTS with an emphasis on television and communications. A drastic change was in the air.  They paid me $25 a week and allowed us to live in their quaint, two-bedroom parsonage.

This move exposed me to the influence of a magnificent communications professor, Dr. Alfred Edyvean, who had trained at Northwestern University under the great speech teacher and poet Lew Sarrett, who had travelled and performed with Carl Sandburg (one of the great entertainers of his time). Dr. Edyvean gave me acceptance and impressed me with his firm kindness, efficient management and knowledge of his field, and presented me with lesson plans for the speech classes that became the center of my classroom teaching success.  For the next two years I toured with his show, The Cup of Trembling, seven roles in a powerful play about the holocaust that played colleges and universities in Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio. We explained in British accents that we were actors playing various roles because all of the participants in this drama were deceased.  And each Nazi I portrayed needed a slightly different German accent.  I recall that in order to project a German prisoner after a bombing raid, I lay on the floor offstage and hyperventilated until I could feel that I could not adequately control my diaphragm.

I learned a valuable lesson in the midst of this conflict. One night while I was at a rehearsal for the spring musical, someone threw large rocks through both the upper and lower panes of a kitchen window and its storm windows in my historical home. Glass shards were everywhere, but our cat that ate in that window area was not hurt.  The glass had been in those windows since 1868, although the storm windows had been  added much later.  I was galled for months with the thought that someone would dislike me enough to do such a thing, as no one had ever made me the victim of retaliation before. I did not believe my drama president would do this—perhaps a friend home from college thought it would be appropriate.  Margaret calls this thinking “vain imaginings and idle fancies.”

Four or five years later two boys in my sophomore English class were telling about the time they had thrown stones through a window in my house before I lived there. “Man, it was awesome—glass everywhere.”  When I assured them I had lived there when they were in the sixth grade, they were sure it was a house across the street from mine. The fact that struck home was that they didn’t do it out of malice towards me personally, and I had allowed myself, without a shred of evidence to support the thought, to believe that I had been the victim of such outrageous hatred.

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About fall play time in my second year at Greenfield-Central, my father passed away, and my brother Chuck insisted that my brother Danny, home from California for the funeral, travel from South Bend with him and my mother to see my play, Life with Father. The set was astonishing and the play required that three breakfasts be served onstage.  I think I’ve mentioned this. The cast went to see a production at an Indianapolis school two weeks prior to our opening, and they were able to discern that the actors had not practiced with real food. “We must begin at once to have food at rehearsals.”

I assured them that we could not afford that much food. I had started at Greenfield with a -$200 balance in drama fund. I had thought we had brought the club to the place where it had a lot of scenery and many costumes on hand and no debts, when the officers went out and bought themselves gifts and expensive trophies for the awards banquet. Their purchases left us again almost exactly $200 in the red. It was the last year for officer gifts, although we gave many awards, plaques and pins, purchased from a couple who sold beautiful trophies inexpensively from their home, and each officer received at least one. And our fund began to grow until it was safe for me to spend $5000 on Hello, Dolly! to prove to myself what a successful drama coach had told me—that “you have to spend money to make money.” It worked!

The actors agreed among themselves that they would contribute food each night during rehearsals. I had designed the set for Life with Father to include an offstage cooking area just behind the living room fireplace so that the smells, especially of bacon, would fill the house as the audience was arriving . After the first rehearsal with food, I found a utility sink backstage filled with unwashed dried-egg platters. These I washed before I went home that night. Then I hid nearly all the dishes, leaving only enough for one table setting. Next, I got a set of dish pans—one for washing, one for rinsing—and a stack of dish towels. Act II breakfast could not be served unless the Act I dishes were washed and ready. It worked like a charm.

Immediately after the curtain call, Danny went backstage to investigate and talk to members of the cast. He did not introduce himself as my brother. What he said to me afterwards was this: “This play has exactly the attention to details that I would expect to come from your mind. You can’t know how important it is for teens at this stage of development to take part in something of true excellence. They can never again be told that something mediocre is good enough.”

My newly widowed mother was there too, but she only noticed that Larry Andrick, in the title role, said “damn” and “damnation.” But we didn’t use all of those that were scripted—we had sometimes used “tarnation” and “by thunder,” etc., but it was too much profanity for her. Her father had travelled in season to Oklahoma to work in the oil fields, but I guess he didn’t use even those mild expletives in front of my Grandma Bisel, who, I am told, had healing powers because she had never used the Lord’s name in vain.