Dave Wood

I figure I’ve spent at least half of my 90 years on this planet lounging in the groves of academe, learning a bit here and there, and sadly forgetting most of that. Still, I have pleasant memories at the seven colleges where I have studied and taught.

One teacher I’ll never forget was Joseph Emerton. He sticks in my head like glue bubbling over the heated pot in Mr. Emerton’s industrial arts shop at Whitehall High School, where he taught for 40 years. Was it because I admired his intellect? Or that I hankered to be as skillful in his chosen profession? Or was it because he was a barrel of laughs, which he most assuredly was not.

Mr. Emerton graduated from what was called The Stout Institute and came to Whitehall in the mid-1920s and stayed in his hallowed shop until the students got to be too much for him in the 60s, after instructing so many boys how to sand a board, solder a dustpan as well as teaching a course in business training, usually populated by students of the female persuasion. As an eighth grader I enrolled in my first and last course in Industrial Arts. Our first project was to construct a perfect bread board, which required hours of sanding, followed by dampening the wood, before attacking it again with increasingly finer sand.

Nex stop was a knife holder for mom’s kitchen, made up of a flat board, an oval holder with five slots sawed into it providing a safe place to store knives of varying size and application. I never managed to paint it before it ended up sanded to a fare-thee well.  The last time I looked I espied my stepbrother’s knife holder hanging on the kitchen wall. And so it went in that last year of grade school when in the third term, I managed to bungle Mr. Emerton’s cunning design of a tin bait box with wings soldered to the backside which allowed plucky young anglers to attach the appliance to one’s belt. The lid on the box was peppered with pinholes, to keep the worms alive and plucky.

At the end of the fourth term, as I sweated over a dustpan, Mr. Emerton took me aside, looking somewhat disappointed. “Next year,” he said in his sing-song cadence, “you’ll be a freshman. I would count it a favor if you would not enroll in Industrial Training because the projects will become more and more complicated and this dustpan you’re working on……” I told him I understood. That meant my next four years would find me in girly classes surrounded by steno bookkeeping wannabes! Ah, the shame of it all.

Forty years later, my father announced he was selling the ancestral home. What about the furniture? “We’ll have an auction. I’ll keep your Great-Grandma’s maple rocker. And the high table that sits in the living room, I’m sure as hell not going to sell that.’’

“Why that?” asked I. 

“Because I made it!”

“It was 1928 and Joe Emerton’s new lathe wave. Most of my classmates were making the colorful orange and yellow cedar chest, but Joe had found this magnificent black walnut log and he thought it would be a good challenge for me to make the whole shebang out of one log. I also never caused trouble in his class.”

“But Mr. Emerton told me once that the meanest kids he ever taught were in the class of 1928, your class.”

  “Yes, they were, but I wasn’t. Joe Emerton was so precise in that blue serge suit he somehow scared the daylights out of me—in a good way.”

And so there you have it. Recently, I watched the famous old Movie, “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” about the devoted British prep schoolmaster, whose students didn’t really appreciate him until they grew up.