Dr. Stewart Brooks
My best teacher memories are of the small Latin classes with Mr. Brooks -not least when we sometimes got off the subject- of English classes with Miss Higgins.
Since these are HS memories (I've been living away since) they don't come with first names...even when I know what they are.
What stayed with me from Miss Higgins' class are e.e. cummings' all-lower-case writing, specifically "archie and mehitable" [sp.?] the concept of some of popular culture at the time being scornfully described by her as "Hollywooden", and the opening lines of Chaucer's work, read to us by her in soft Middle English: "Whan that Aprille with hiss shores softe the drought of March hass perced to the roote..." OK, any of you with education since then need to know that I'm trying to reproduce the pronunciation, which is when I learned that all those silent final "e"s were once pronounced, as were the "gh" we've dropped long since, but then had a Germanic sound to them.
I still sometimes explain this to friends struggling to learn our so-dreadfully-misspelled language: we changed the pronunciation, but never changed the spelling. And she pointed out that Chaucer gently indicated the comfort-expecting character of a preacher, by saying he pushed the cat off a chair to sit, when a guest in someone's home...since the cat would surely be on the most comfortable chair.
Dr. Brooks (his title, since he had his PhD) was our Latin teacher, and it was a cool class, because, by my last year there (1960-1961), there were only six of us in the class (was it really 3rd year Latin??), so there was sometimes some informality. He always wore a tie with black and orange, the Princeton colors, and he got around town on a bicycle (a funny sight, as he was tall, no athlete).
Our family closed up the house in Eastham and moved for my senior year to Toledo, Ohio, so that's where I graduated in 1962. Quite a change, but good for us.
