Ol’ Bill and Ol’ Jim both said it was the best outdoor story they had ever read. I was proud of it, the account of a young English Setter that had run off with a red wolf and had a litter of half-wolf puppies. I had written it right there at the pool hall one evening after school, in between racking balls and collecting money for my dad at the age of twelve-and-a-half. Mrs. Murrell, the 8th grade teacher, had given her English class the assignment of writing a story. She was going to read the best one out loud, and I figured it would be mine.
But such was not to be. That doggone Nolan Don Akins wrote something called, “My Family Shangrila” and she just swooned over it. Read it out loud with most all the class, including me especially, not knowing what a Shangrila was before or after she read it. I couldn’t be mad at Nolan Don, one of the few kids in the eighth grade I could get along with.
He was quiet and friendly, even though he was a top-notch basketball player on the Houston Tiger team. Most generally athletes put themselves on a level kids like me couldn’t attain. But not Nolan. When we were seniors, Nolan Don and I took an aviation class with Coach Weaver and flew around Texas County in a single engine Cessna airplane. The whole time in the air I was scared to death. He took to it and became a big-time airline pilot for United or American or some top-of-the-line airline company. I never knew him well, because playing varsity basketball well and shooting pool well are different achievements. But I liked him… who wouldn’t. I liked him even though his family was well off. He never acted like he was on a different level than anyone else, even though he was, in my eyes.
Anyhow, Mrs. Murrell thought he was too, and she read his story as I wilted, near about to cry. She did however ask me to stay after class and I thought maybe she would tell me I had written a good account of romance in the woods! She thought it was a little too descriptive I guess, and gave me a C-plus. She told me as I left to never use the word ‘bitch’ in anything I wrote in her class, ever again.
Lord almighty, was I decimated (I think that might be the word, but if it ain’t substitute your own.) Crestfallen might fit, or discombobulated.
Anyway, in one of my books, (I think it might be “The Front Bench Regulars”) I wrote about how the old men in the pool hall tried to cheer me up that evening. It is not easy to convince a boy who thinks he has no redeeming qualities and no self-esteem that God doesn’t look at him that way. But never has a 12-year-old boy had so many grandfathers!
Now skip to the following year when I was a thirteen-and-one-half-year-old high school freshman. I fell head over heels for the freshman English Teacher, Ms. Susan Catlett, only about 24- or 25-years old and beautiful. That first week, Ms. Catlett had all of us write an essay, and I did it up right, a story about a young Canadian trapper and his uncle, Old Pete, coping with a wolverine in the northern wilderness.
Ms. Catlett kept me after class that Friday morning to tell me how good it was, and offer some tips to help me sharpen my writing ability. I will remember forever what she said to me as I walked out the door, my heart soaring. She said, “Larry, I think you might be on your way to being a professional writer”. A professional writer…rather than joining the army as some of my other teachers advised me?
I never ever wanted to go to school like I did that next Monday morning. Ms. Catlett was there, a young woman I might actually be able to marry in 6 or 7 years!! But Ms Catlett wasn’t there. My heart sank again. Why? In my mind I contemplated how she had perhaps been fired for liking me and my writing. I didn’t know that Houston High School did not look at me as I did. They wouldn’t have done that. But you could not have convinced me of that. I was sure, back then, that I had enemies galore in that school. When you were referred to as “the pool hall kid” by so many, you learned to hate, and start making revenge lists. As a high school freshman, I began to do that, and most everyone in my class got on that list at one time or another, plus several teachers, then business people in town. I was a mixed up and kid.
But five years from that time, I began to sell a newspaper column while a student at M.U. and my first magazine articles to a Texas outdoor magazine, and then 8 years later to Outdoor Life and Sports Afield, as I became the Outdoor Editor for the largest newspaper in Arkansas. I wanted so badly to tell Ms. Catlett I had lived up to her prediction for me.
About ten years ago I met Ms. Catlett’s sister at Mt. Grove Missouri and she had a tear in her eye as I told her of my love for the greatest teacher ever… her sister Susan. She gave me her sister’s picture and one of her college journalism books. And then she told me something that in thinking about it today, still makes my heart heavy.
“She wasn’t fired,” her sister told me. “That weekend after you met her, she killed herself!”
I hope somewhere in heaven Ms. Catlett knows that when she told me I might amount to something as a writer, she inspired me to do just that. I never became more than just average at what I do but that is enough, at least it is the best I can do with whatever talent God gave me.
But Houston High School had many people who did become “great”. Like my friend, Nolan Don Akins.
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