Mr. Howell

I lived in a growing community when I was in high school. Lots of baby boomers and lots of government work. We needed another high school, so I went to school from 7:00 to 12:00 noon. The kids who would go to the other school went from 12:30 to 5:30. My last class the year I was a sophomore was English as taught by Mr. Howell.

How he got a job teaching impressionable youngsters in very conservative half Mormon Idaho Falls remains a mystery. He was 35ish, a womanizer, smoked, drank, and had diabetes. The first day of class he stood up and told us he thought grammar was so much bunk and we were on our own if we wanted to learn it. But he would be delighted to teach us literature. He was true to his word. Half the time he either gave us an assignment out of the hated grammar book (which we were then expected to correct ourselves from the teacher’s edition sitting on his desk) and left or didn’t show up at all, sometimes leaving a page number on the blackboard in his ungainly scrawl.

When he was there, and completely present, he taught us more about literature than I learned from many a college prof. It was in his class that I learned that not everything written is as it seems to be on the surface. It was from him I learned the magic words simile, metaphor, symbol. He hated poetry, so we had none of that, but we did go deeply into much of the good modern writing that he loved.

I started to write…not just the phony baloney soap operas that I had been writing to entertain a few of my friends, but long maudlin essays on truth and beauty. I would stand at his desk until all the other students were gone and then I would hand him pages of sophomoric dribble. Mr. Howell would accept them graciously and actually read them. He was a generous reader and told me my essays were refreshing and that he enjoyed reading them. Then we would discuss truth and beauty and symbolism for a few minutes. Just Mr. Howell and me. Those discussions were the jewels of my days. I missed the bus and walked two miles home in the snow for them.

One day I asked Mr. Howell if he would recommend a book for me to read. Oh, heaven! He started rattling off a list of books and authors that I should read. I wrote as fast as I could. I still have that list; it is one of my treasures. Some of my favorite books have been taken from that list. Some of the books I have not yet read, and do not plan to read. If my parents knew that my sophomore English teacher recommended that I read The Last Temptation of Christ (Nikos Kazan…long Greek name) and The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger), I am sure they would have had him fired. I have picked up The Last Temptation once or twice and looked at it, but I have not read it. I read The Catcher in the Rye a few years after he recommended it and wondered what all the fuss was about. I didn’t find it particularly good or terribly shocking. I enjoyed Franny and Zooey (J.D. Salinger) much more. But then there was Crescent Delahanty (Jessamyn West) which I read when I was fifteen, and have reread five or six times as the years have gone by. It’s a different book every time I read it and always a delight.

Mr. Howell told us that sex was always good in a book and suggested that there was sex in the story we had just read. No. No….there was no sex in that book, Mr. Howell, we all said in our own way at the same time. Quite an uproar. He laughed, throwing back his head so his longish blond hair flopped back down on his forehead. When it was quiet, he asked us about the boy and girl who held hands. Yes, but that wasn’t sex we said. That was just holding hands. Fifteen and sixteen year olds know the difference between sex and holding hands. Just ask them…they can tell you. But the desire is there, he told us. The desire is what makes it interesting, is what drives so much of what people do. There may not have been anybody going to bed together in that story, but there certainly was sex. We had to admit he was right. And he still is.

I think someone must have blown the whistle on him. Mr. Howell didn’t teach at the high school the next year. His obituary was in the newspaper before I graduated from high school. Someone found him dead in his apartment. A diabetic coma, the newspaper said. He died alone.

I never got to thank him for teaching me to read. Again.


Rinda Fullmer
Copyright 2006