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By Russell Smith of San Angelo
Editor’s Note: As each new school year begins, it brings with it a unique set of opportunities and challenges. We hope that the following article submitted by former San Angelo police chief Russell Smith lets you begin the new year reminded of the enormous impact you have on the lives of your students. Mr. Smith, while acknowledging that it was nearly 40 years before he called Mrs. Ida Greenhill of Pleasanton to thank her, said “Too often we don’t tell our teachers what they’ve meant to our lives.” So, just in case you haven’t received one of those calls lately, here’s one to share.
The research paper had two grades inscribed at the top. The C was for mechanics and the A was for content. Something like the following was written below, “You may never write the story right, but you sure have a way of telling it.” Those words written by Mrs. Mae H. Crump, my Uvalde High School English teacher in 1969, have stayed with me my whole life. They are just one example of how teachers truly do make a difference in their students’ lives.
My first memory of writing was in junior high. I carried around a spiral notebook and filled it with words, phrases and sentences that I called poems. By high school I was writing on a regular basis. I was even sent to the office once for writing a group of rhyming phrases on the back of a test. I think it had something to do with the words describing the pretty teacher.
I was not the best student. While I should have been paying attention and learning, I wrote in my spiral notebook. A teacher named Mrs. Ida Greenhill impacted my life first during my sophomore year. She took me to Mrs. Crump and told her I needed to spend my homeroom time there. The more tenured teacher agreed to take me under her wing. I was the only student in her otherwise empty class during that period.
Mrs. Crump started to educate me about meter and rhyme. The words iambic pentameter started to mean something, as did the forms called ballads and sonnets. It was a topic that I was interested in and I tried to write to form, to what I had learned from her. It was during high school that I started to develop a dream about becoming a writer, about making a living at it, but life doesn’t always deal us the cards we want.
I became an automobile mechanic soon after high school, then a San Angelo policeman. Mrs. Crump never knew that I sold my first article to a police trade magazine in 1980, or that I would retire as San Angelo’s police chief in 1999. She never knew that I wrote for a number of magazines and spent five years as the Outdoor Writer for the San Angelo Standard Times. She never knew that I researched, wrote and published my first non-fiction book, The Gun That Wasn’t There (Booksurge) in February 2007. But she did make a difference in my life.
Teachers are in a profession that has one thing in common with nurses, waitresses and policemen; they don’t necessarily get to pick which individual clientele they serve. I know that there are both good and bad days, and that children and their behavior have changed with the times. But I also know that teachers can encourage students to fulfill their dreams for the future. I know Mrs. Greenhill and Mrs. Crump did. Thank you – all teachers – for doing what you do.
Web posted: 08/27/07
