Only shorter, balder, less handsome, and more potbellied. Otherwise a dead ringer. Except he never took his shirt off. He was Papa.

He was two things. 1) The dean and ‘in loco parentis’ of all the freshmen at my school. Never a hint of any funny business. He was stern but friendly. You could talk to him but he would never baby you. Swank Hall, the freshman dorm, was his responsibility. He didn’t try to be a colonel or even a major. He was just your parents who couldn’t be there. Kids hated him until later. We’ll get back to that.

2) A tough challenge to be one of the two most feared teachers on campus. In this case it was a draw. The tie was with Eric Harris, a deliberately intimidating Brit who savaged us all in Anglican fury during twice weekly sermons in chapel services and savaged his own students in both basic Chemistry and Chemistry AP. It’s reported, apocryphally, that he never spoke again to the one student he had who got only a 798 on the Chem Achievement SAT and wound up going to UVA. (Not true. Thing is, except for this one guy, all his AP Chem students got 800s, year after year after year.)

Oops. Not Eric Harris. The best teacher, Richard Miller. Another story, another post.

Here’s the one.

Eric Harris never smiled.

Which leaves us with the other contender. Papa. When my wife said he must have a coat and tie, I said no. But surely he did. It’s just that his tummy stuck out farther. All Latin classes were in the basement, perhaps a sign of declining influence but also of the fundament they represented.

I was a freshman designated Latin II because I had nominally studied Latin for six years prior, all of which was devoted to inane textbooks telling us how Sixtus had a pencil. Then I fell into the hell of Latin II, which was a four week review of the grammar of Latin I, none of which I had ever been taught. There was a 30 page green covered review book. Everyone else had one, well thumbed and marked on. Mine was brand new. All the declensions. All the conjugations. All the vocabularies prefatory to Caesar. A brain dump of staggering proportions.

I was terrified. But so was everyone else. They didn’t remember what I had already not learned. And every single day there was going to be a quiz.

How it went. He was always a minute or two later than us, jingling his school keys in his pocket. He unlocked the door. We went in and took our seats. Then he opened his lower wooden drawer, filled with 6″ X 8″ sheets of torn newsprints. We all knew. There was a quiz every day. We took the quiz. Then he collected them. Then he passed out the results of yesterday’s quiz and reassigned seating based on the results. Best scores sat at the back, worst at the front. Then the day’s lesson began.

And that was just a normal day. Our schedule rotated. Every subject met first period one day a week and worked its way up through the week. When a class met first period you could have an hour exam unannounced if the master so chose. Those were the worst moments of our lives. Waiting at the locked door for Papa to show up and give us an hour exam, unannounced in first period. Jingle jingle jingle the keys. Short fat bald potbellied man. And then the 1940 CEEB Latin exam, way harder than the SAT AP exam would ever be.

Thing was, he was trying to teach us Latin. Only way I got through his Latin II review of Latin I was sentence diagramming, which I learned in elementary school from gifted teachers. Pieced it together, don’t you know?

Got through my first marking period. And through Caesar. And learned in Caesar what everyone needs to learn. His method was requiring translation on the blackboard. Then he would move like the Wolverine with his yellow chalk claws through every translation demanding corrections. Midway, he demanded we do the same to each other, big wide chalk slashes through what we thought was wrong.

Then we got to Vergil. A bunch of old Szekeley hands, many of us illiterates previously, who could now be counted on to date every daily quiz with the correct Latin date and knew how to read every line out loud in dactylic hexameter.

Imagine kids whose highest intellectual attainment was being able to write, on demand, the first eleven lines of the Aeneid. Even the Lacrosse jocks could do it. Most feared teacher.