My sister Randi was badly laid up with some severe, even debilitating back pain (it seems to be a bad case of a pinch sciatic nerve) while we were in Decorah, so one surprising stop on our itinerary was the chiropractor’s office where she had an appointment to undergo some prodding and poking. As we sat in the waiting room and I caught up on Decorah News via the local newspaper, I was flabbergasted to see a notice in the obituaries that one of my fifth grade teachers, Mrs. Akre, has just passed away at the age of 90.
“Flabbergasted” might seem like a strong term to describe my reaction, but Mrs. Akre seemed like she was 90 when I had her in school 38 years ago. No, not really 90, but she seemed fairly advanced in years. . . easily the most elderly of the teachers at East Side Elementary School. But if I’m doing my math correctly (a fairly substantial “if”) by calculating from the date of birth given in the obituary and figuring out the year I would have started the fifth grade (1970) Mrs. Akre was 52 years old at the start of that school year, which is four years older than I am right now – and trying to make sense of all that is really putting my brain through a high-heat stir fry. I would never in a million years have guessed that she was 52 years old when I had her. Maybe 58 and more likely 62 or even 67 or 72. I think my impression was that because most any 10-year-old thinks that anybody over 40 is actually pushing 80 and probably voted for Woodrow Wilson. . . and partly that Mrs. Akre dressed in rather conservative, austere, mature style (unlike Mrs. Ruen downstairs who wore brightly-colored and color- coordinated outfits in which her shoes and dangling earrings would be the same shade of pink or yellow or whatever the color of the day happened to be) . . . and partly because my other fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Peck, was a powerhouse teacher who was built like an NFL linebacker and just as formidable, and although she was probably fairly close in age to Mrs. Akre, she just seemed so much more powerful and imposing. And by the way, I LOVED Mrs. Peck exactly because she ran her classroom like she was General Patton. (Actually, because she had a great sense of humor and a great heart, maybe I should compare her to Colonel Potter on M*A*S*H.) Anyway, next to Mrs. Peck Mrs. Akre was quieter and (no disrespect intended) rather staid and boring – and seemed much older than Mrs. Peck. And much older than 52.
So either the obituary has it wrong – or Mrs. Akre lied about her age – OR when I first walked into her classroom in the fall of 1970, she was 52 – a birthday I will be seeing before too long. But the obituary also has me reeling because it mentions that she was married in 1940 (so she would have been 22 at the time) – and her husband passed away in 1962, meaning that she was a widow at the age of 44. It’s so strange to think about a teacher you’ve had having a life outside of the school building (it was always so exciting and even astonishing if you bumped into your teacher at the grocery store “after hours”) but especially to think about a teacher suffering this kind of loss. . . which maybe explained why she had this whiff of sadness about her.
It further astonishes me to read that she and I were alums of the same school, Luther College, from which she graduated in 1964 – which makes it seem like she went back to school shortly after her husband’s death, perhaps to secure more complete and official teaching credentials. (Her teaching career began in rural schools.) When I first read that, I tried to picture her riding aboard a float in the homecoming parade or chasing fellow Brandt Hall residents down the hall with a fire extinguisher (utterly outrageous images) until I realized that she would have been a non-traditional student, on campus only for class before returning to wherever she lived. What must that have felt like for her to be back at college, a widow in her forties? (Actually, the obituary makes no mention of any earlier schooling other than high school, so perhaps she was in college for the first time.)
It was also interesting to read that she was preceded in death by all six of her brothers (one of whom was named Engolf) – – – and survived by all three of her three sisters. Reading that and trying to picture my fifth grade teacher as a youngster, growing up in a family of ten children, leaves me shaking my head. And she was an avid Bridge player. (I cannot picture that for the life of me.) And she loved to bake bread, muffins, cookies, as well as Norwegian treats like lefse and krumkake. And she was a longtime volunteer for Winneshiek County’s Department of Human Services. And she had a son and a daughter, and grandchildren. In short, she had a LIFE outside of that classroom. How often do we think of our classroom teachers in that way? Even when we see them fairly often outside of the classroom (as was the case for me with teachers like Mrs. Ronken, Mrs. Svanoe, and Mrs. Hanson, who belonged to our church) it still was and in some ways is still hard to think of them as people. For a kid like me who loved school and wanted to succeed there, the teachers were almost like astronauts – or firefighters. Someone just a little bit bigger than life. (I don’t know how true that is anymore; I’ll have to ask my wife if her students think of her as an astronaut who plays the piano. I suspect that question will prompt a very odd look from her.)
My gosh – I never would have dreamt that my longest blog entry ever (and I’m not done yet) would be about a fifth grade teacher I haven’t seen in over 35 years – and have scarcely thought about in that time. But seeing this obituary (and it feels like such serendipity that I just happened to read it) has unleashed all these feelings if not a flood of specific memories from her classroom. I do remember some things…. and unfortunately for you, I’m not going to keep them to myself….
She had one of the biggest classrooms in the school – with a really high ceiling – and she was one of a few teachers whose name was emblazoned above her doorway with what seemed like a semi-permanent wooden plaque (versus a hand-drawn sign at eye level, which most teachers had). Funny the useless information which remains firmly planted in our heads….
I fainted in her classroom once, and it was right after we got done watching a film (we watched films back then, not videos) which had run very jerkily, and the school nurse thought that’s what made me faint. I remember that Mrs. Akre had me just lay on the floor until one of my folks could come to pick me up and bring me home while the rest of the kids went to lunch . . . and I can remember people walking past the classroom doorway and trying to figure out why in the world a little boy was lying there…
I can remember doing a really good job once on an assignment that a lot of other kids screwed up (what could be more delicious a memory than that?) in which we were supposed to write a review of something we watched on television. We were not supposed to just recount what was on the show in question – but to explain if we liked it and why or why not. What a great assignment for fifth grade! And we had to read them out loud for the rest of the class. I reviewed that week’s installment of the Carol Burnett Show, and although I cannot remember a single specific about what I said (sorry to disappoint you) I know that I was basically the only student in the whole class who did what they were supposed to do. Everybody else just wrote summaries of what they saw- and pretty rotten summaries at that. And of course, several people hadn’t done the assignment at all but walked up there and pretended to read a paper they hadn’t yet written and then tried their best to dash off the paper back at their desk before they were all collected. They were easy to detect because they were trying to re-word someone else’s summary of something they themselves hadn’t actually viewed. I can still remember Mary Massman getting up there and reading a fake, unwritten paper about that week’s installment of The Lucy Show – something about a big tuna – stumbling big time all the way, even though she was the fourth or fifth student to get up there and talk about the same thing- and then rushing back to her desk, grabbed a pencil and paper, and wrote the paper she should have written the night before. (I know because her desk was right next to mine in the back row of the room. Lucky for her.) At the risk of painting myself in unflattering terms, this was one of those moments of triumph when I could look around the room and think to myself “I did the best! I did the best!” I was the Michael Phelps of that admittedly limited domain, at least that day.
My only other potent memory of Mrs. Akre is not from the classroom as such . . . but from the fact that she accepted my parent’s invitation (or was it mine?) to attend one of my piano recitals. Mrs. Peck was also invited but couldn’t / didn’t attend – and she was the one I most wanted to be there. But Mrs. Akre did come- dressed to the nines, I remember- and I remember overhearing her tell my parents how pleased she was to have been invited and something to the effect that she couldn’t ever remember receiving such an invitation before. I hope that wasn’t true – or if it was true, I hope that wasn’t something that made her sad. Which makes me also hope that there were students who appreciated Mrs. Akre more than I did and who expressed their appreciation to her more than I did.
One last thing. . . The obiturary said that memorials for Mrs. Akre can be sent to the Iowa Chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association. Those words sent a bit of a chill up and down my spine, as I wondered what sort of suffering that terrible disease caused her. I hope that the last years for Mrs. Akre weren’t too difficult and that one way or another she felt loved and appreciated and believed that she made a difference.
Because she did.