People tend to use superlatives rather loosely. You’ll hear someone refer to a pro athlete as a “Superstar,” when in reality, compared to their respective sport’s league history, they’re really just above average. If you’re being generous, they’re very good, maybe even great. Superstar should apply to next level greatness, performances that elevate those around them and transcend the norm. It’s a term that shouldn’t be reserved for entertainers. But maybe because there isn’t a league for parents, friends and siblings to measure against, the word Superstar in every day life is steeped in subjectivity. So I suppose it’s the same with teachers. What makes a great teacher? Thoughtfulness, intelligence, an ability to reach their students most likely. Being able to connect. All of us, even if we’re home-schooled, have had teachers our entire life, and their impact, both negative and positive, can end up shaping us, especially in our younger years. If we’re lucky, as we pass through the education system, we encounter some great ones. If we’re really lucky, we get a Superstar, a teacher that transcends all others. I’ve had a couple growing up, and last week I lost one of my favorites.
Chris Taylor was 76 at the time of his recent passing. I never had Chris as a homeroom teacher. I had him for science and a cooking class. I remember all the aquariums and plants in his room and spilling a tray of Swedish Meatballs with my buddy John Byrne, but that’s another story. I first got to know Chris in September of 1972, after my older brother passed away. A couple years earlier, my best friend was killed in an accident. The sudden vanishing of two loved ones left me with a huge void inside. My brother, Doug was 12 years older than me, my hero. At 22, he was a larger than life figure, and even considering his huge physical presence, Doug was truly my big brother. I retreated into my art, and even as I continued to play the three major sports, became withdrawn. To this day, Fall remains for me a love/hate season.
I grew up in a middle class neighborhood in Detroit, a block away from St. Jude’s Parish. Chris was a young lay teacher at Jude’s, a grade school full of nuns, many of whom should never have been teaching kids. He was a young guy, and had a fun way of teaching. He put on the plays and talent shows at the school, elaborate productions where kids could go outside their comfort zone, perform and sing, become somebody else. He also arranged grade-wide camping trips. The entire class would head to state parks, some only 25 miles away but to many Detroiters like me whose parents didn’t camp, may as well have been in Alaska. Because of Chris I saw turtles, frogs, salamanders and deer. Seeing a deer back then was a rare sight. Now they’re like squirrels; you have to be careful not to hit one in most Metro Detroit neighborhoods. For the first time in my life I saw fireflies, which—this is the truth—I thought were a myth, some fable like Icarus, a cool idea dreamed up by an ancient writer. On camping trips we later took to farther northern locations, I learned to appreciate nature in all of its glory, ice cold streams and rivers, catching brook trout, picking wild berries, climbing small mountains and seeing wolf tracks. We swam in all the Great Lakes, namely Superior. He gave me a firsthand education of the wilderness. But mainly Chris gave me hope that my life could return to a sense of normalcy.
He did that, not by treating me differently, but by treating me like everybody else. Chris didn’t look at me with any kind of pity. On the contrary he had a biting wit and could tease you with the best of them. He knew how far to take it—most of the time! He teased everybody. Nobody was spared. This was part of his charm. Yes he had his favorites, and we all hoped to be one of them. Special people have that effect on us. He was also warm and intelligent, firm when he had to be and always making sure his students had music to listen to in the classroom. His sense of humor and easy laugh was a welcome salve to me, all of this at a time when laughter was at a premium in my life. I didn’t want to be in the plays as a performer, but he convinced me to paint some of the background sets and design the posters. And as the last three years of grade school transpired, he was a big reason I returned to a closer version of myself.
Chris smoked a lot on those camping trips, and in the end, that’s what caused his death. I remember camping in the far reaches of northern Minnesota, in the BWCA up past Duluth, and he always had a cigarette handy. Smells are often connected to memory, and so it is that sometimes when I smell a cigarette, which is rare these days (thank God), I drift back to the first time I saw deer, black bears and moose in the wild. Chris’s Uncle Jim Tormondson once got us aboard a 1,000 foot freighter, at the time one of only a very few on the Great Lakes. I’ll never forget him telling Jim that he’d hoped to get us kids to see the freighter that was docked at Taconite Harbor, some 30 miles southwest of Grand Marais and only 6 miles from Tofte, the small town Chris’s grandfather had founded when he migrated from Norway.
”Hell, I’ll get you on that ship. We’ll take my boat.”
”You can’t get on those ships Unc…”
Jim waved him off and soon we were in his cabin cruiser, flying across the blue-black water of Lake Superior, hurtling towards the ore dock. I’ll never forget looking at the boat’s sonar as the depths went from 50 to 500 feet, proof that Lake Superior was truly a freshwater ocean. When we got alongside the freighter, the five of us kids looked up in awe at the immense size of it, a boat over three football fields in length. A man in a crisp white uniform leaned over and shouted down to Jim, “Hey there. Help you?”
”You the first mate?”
”I am.”
”Know the Edgewater Bar in Tofte?”
”I do. Going there tonight.”
”Well you tell ‘em you’re drinking on Jim Tormondson tonight.”
”Thank you. Guys want a tour?”
Chris’s jaw dropped. I still remember looking down at the cavernous hulls and asking the first mate, “What are those things down there?”
”Those are workers.” They literally looked like ants.
After grade school, Chris remained a mentor, a friend I (and many other students) would visit at our old grade school. Later Chris went on to produce plays at the nearby high school, Regina, an all girl’s Catholic school located next door to my high school, Notre Dame, an all male Catholic school. As adolescents and young adults, and no longer our teacher, we came to consider Chris more like a friend. He was still cool, funny and always there for any of us to talk to, about anything and everything. And many of us did. He was there as we struggled with our classes, our relationships with girls, with guys and what college we should attend or what trade to go into.
I had a lot of conversations with Chris over the years after I graduated high school. I ended up going to Northern Michigan University, in great part because of the abundant natural resources and close proximity to Lake Superior, the affection for both borne by those early camping trips. Chris later moved to Utah, teaching out there for many years, before finally moving back to Detroit. Sure he teased us as kids, and yes he could be merciless. Times were very different, and there were probably some kids who handled it better than others. A couple years ago he confessed to me that he felt bad that he teased me at all, especially given my mindset in 1972. “Don’t feel bad,” I said. What he didn’t realize, I told him, was in part that’s what helped me to start moving past my grief. Teasing helped? Like I said, the definition for what makes an everyday person, even a teacher, a Superstar is subjective. And it may sound unconventional, especially in this era where every word and phrase is parsed and we walk on eggshells for fear of offending or in extreme cases, ending careers. But it helped me in the same way a tough coach is later looked on with reverence by his former players. Chris’s Facebook page has been inundated with similar stories, past teachers, parents and of course students posting memories like mine, many calling him their favorite teacher, the one that had the most impact on their formative years. In the end, we hold onto those memories and realize that we all count.
If I’ve learned anything through the years, it’s that we all have the chance to be a Superstar in somebody else’s life.