Summer of ‘61--When She Taught Me a Sense of Loss

Heat and dust and grasshoppers.

That was the trifecta of immutable life forces that fed the summers in central Nebraska in my little town of 200 people. It was an unchangeable menu that, even with the opportunity to play baseball every day, inevitably turned summers into lethargic, boring interludes between the school years.

Not that a new school term offered much hope for resuscitation. In farm towns of that size, nothing was quite as dependable as sameness. You had the same classmates every year. And because there was only one teacher per grade, you knew who she was going to be the next year. And the year after that.

So it was as my class of 16 finished fifth grade in the spring of 1960, a year under the tutelage of Hazel Campbell. With her white hair tied in a bun, she looked the part of the schoolmarm but proved to be a good-hearted, conscientious teacher insistent only on us learning. To that end, she was cut from the teacher’s mold at the school--often women in their 50s or 60s who had made elementary school teaching their life.

Goodby, Mrs. Campbell.

Hello, heat and the dust and the grasshoppers of another changeless summer.

Then came September of 1960.

The gang was back--Jim McHargue, Byron Herbig, Nancy Gustafson, Julie Hermansen and the rest. But where was Adnelle Zimber, the sixth-grade teacher?

Instead. . . .

Her name was Sue Henry, and even thinking about her now I see the eyes first, then the smile. She was a dark-haired beauty, tall and thin, with pouty lips and an ease that always seemed beckoning.

She was a stunning vision, cheery and enthusiastic and athletic. She was the most irresistible person I had ever met and, like the 11-year-old palooka that I was, I fell for her.

It wasn’t a one-sided affair.

Sure, she spent time with the other kids; she had to, it was her job. But didn’t she linger a little longer over my desk as she made her rounds? Didn’t she greet me with a little more interest when I’d raise my hand and walk up to her desk with a question? Didn’t she seem more pleased when I knew the right answer to a question?

I was the school’s contestant in the county spelling bee and as the contest neared, she would stay after school and tutor me, going through word after word in the Eaton’s Blue Back Speller. On a few occasions, she’d take me home with her for the night, and we’d study some more.

She lived 10 miles away, a veritable odyssey for a small-town Nebraska kid back then, and the overnight trips home with her were like being transported to some magical place by the most beautiful woman in the world. Sure, she was married, but she made me feel like the center of her universe.

The magic continued until a balmy day in May near the end of the semester, when the pain hit. There was no warning, no detectable precondition symptoms. It was as though one moment life was wonderful, and the next it hurt like hell.

All I know is that it happened at the ballpark, where our class was having its year-end party.

Out of the blue Nebraska sky that day, a love-struck 11-year-old kid had his first conscious awareness of the fragility of human relationships. Everyone was saying their goodbys and thinking about the summer, and it dawned on me that Sue Henry and I were separating.

At that age, the future is something that comes very slowly. And although I had known that our family was moving out of little Marquette and into the huge metropolis of Omaha 125 miles away, the move was now upon us.

No more changeless summers.

We moved into Omaha within a few weeks and lived in a duplex with my grandparents. The games played on the dusty ball fields of Marquette were replaced by stickball in the alley that abutted my grandparents’ home, using car fenders for bases. I preregistered in an Omaha junior high school that had six times as many students as the entire population of Marquette.

From my new vantage point in life, I wrote Sue Henry a letter, and she wrote back. In my mind’s eye, I can still see her handwriting. I quickly wrote a second letter, but her reply never came.

Somewhere during that summer of 1961, the summer of much change, I must have figured things out.

In the final analysis, I guess this is nothing more than a silly guy’s tale about passages in one’s life. Your garden variety coming-of-age story.

What strikes me, though, is how fresh the memory of Sue Henry is and how tangible the melancholy and sense of loss when I recall her.

I was thinking of her after reading the story of the El Toro kindergarten teacher who retired last week after 43 years. I wonder if teachers realize the impact they have on their students, the memories they embed.

It’s been 30 years since I saw Sue Henry. She’s probably Out There Somewhere, a woman in her 50s. I wonder if she’s still married, still teaching, if she became a mother.

It would be fun to sit down and tell her all the things she taught me, things that had nothing to do with Eaton’s Blue Back Speller.

And to ask her why she never wrote back.