The High School Faculty
by Jay Dubya

Tim Carley and Bob Gordon were close friends and almost inseparable amigos on 
the high school faculty. Tim taught both U.S. and Ancient History courses in a 
room that had been originally designed as part of a larger family living 
classroom. A toilet that was once in the family living room was partitioned off 
and soon became a part of Tim's social studies' office. An entrance door to the 
office and toilet separated the porcelain fixture from Tim's history classroom.

The availability of the toilet proved very commodious to Tim. Whenever a student 
with weak kidneys asked the history teacher if he or she could visit the 
lavatory Tim would open the door to his office and say, "Sure! Use the 
facilities right here in my office!" The history mentor would then open the door 
to his office exposing the glistening hopper to the view of the appreciative 
class.

The student seeking relief would consider the thought of embarrassing noises 
emanating from the office into the classroom and then become discouraged from 
attempting to conveniently answer nature's call. Tim Carley was seldom plagued 
with continuous annoying student requests to leave the room and use the bathroom 
facilities.

One day when Tim was enlightening his second period World Civilizations students 
on the brilliant attainments of the ancient Mesopotamian culture, a temporary 
classroom silence was created when everyone in the room heard a distinct 
gurgling reverberation. All heads turned left as the office door opened and then 
out stepped the unabashed Bob Gordon. He casually waved a cute salutation to Tim 
and his World Civilizations class, acting totally nonchalant about the 
impropriety of his "unprofessional toilet flushing conduct." Tim Carley's face 
turned redder than a beet as the mixed class snickered and chuckled for a full 
five minutes.

On another occasion Tim Carley and Bob Gordon were chaperones on the senior 
class Washington Trip. The two teachers supervised rooms and randomly searched 
student luggage for booze that might have illegally been smuggled into the 
motel. After confiscating six pints of alcohol in true Eliot Ness fashion Bob 
and Tim generously re-distributed their plunder to the ten faculty chaperones on 
duty as a well' deserved "Washington Trip fringe benefit." And so the grateful 
teachers had a small all-night party at the expense of some irascible-minded 
students trying to pull a fast one.

On that same Washington Trip Tim and Bob had a photo taken of them sitting with 
a manikin of Lyndon B. Johnson at a District of Columbia wax museum. A mock 
newspaper headline along with the photo was published at a novelty store and it 
read, "Local Teachers Confer with President Johnson." The front page of the mock 
newspaper was conspicuously hung on a central bulletin board in the main high 
school corridor. The unique piece of journalism lingered there for two whole 
months without it ever being noticed or scrutinized by students changing 
classes. Then I decided to bring the unique newspaper item to a talkative 
student's attention and it wasn't long before the thumb' tacked poster became 
one of the featured points of student interest while they were passing and then 
stopping to gander at the newspaper headline spectacle between classes.

Bob Gordon was notorious for playing pranks at teacher parties. Once while Mr. 
Gordon was attending a rollicking Friday night affair hosted by math teacher Jim 
Kyle, Bob tested the alcoholic capacity of seven fish swimming about in Jim's 
aquarium. When no one was looking Mr. Gordon poured a large quantity of vodka 
into the fish tank to scientifically study how the intoxicant would influence 
the swimming patterns of the victimized marine-life.

The next morning the teacher that had thrown the big shindig the night before 
discovered his seven fish floating on top of the water instead of in it. The 
following Monday at school I consoled the depressed party host by saying, "Well 
Jim, I guess there isn't too much validity to the statement he drinks like a 
fish! I believe someone with unscrupulous intentions must have poured vodka or 
gin into your aquarium! What a way to get tanked!"

"Thanks a lot!" the despondent teacher disgustedly answered. "Your kindness 
underwhelms me!"

At another wild faculty party given by Jim Kyle Bob Gordon raided the bathroom 
medicine chest. He secretly confiscated our host's razor blades leaving only one 
behind, which the trickster mercilessly warped out of shape and then somehow 
managed to insert the twisted shaving blade into Jim Kyle's razor. On Monday 
morning the aggravated teacher that had just lost seven aquarium fish the week 
before showed up at school with a face that appeared as if it had been shaven by 
a power lawnmower.

"Well Jim, at least you don't have a five o'clock shadow! Anyway that was a 
great happening at your place Sunday night!" I commented as I stared at the 
nicks and gashes that gutted Mr. Kyle's countenance.

"Somebody else is gonna' throw the next damned teacher' party," Jim glumly 
answered. "I've had it hosting this damned unappreciative faculty!"

Bob Gordon always had a prank or two up his sleeve. The main corridor of the 
high school had two attractive planters attached to a wall with neatly arranged 
displays of artificial plants and flowers inside them. Bob surreptitiously 
noticed that certain overhead spotlights ideally beamed shafts of light directly 
into the flowerboxes.

In January of ‘68 early each morning Mr. Bob Gordon would clandestinely deposit 
several pounds of dirt into the flowerboxes before any administrators were in 
the building. After two weeks passed Bob was ready to initiate phase two of his 
devious scheme. He planted pumpkin and sunflower seeds into the freshly 
transferred soil. Several weeks' later student passers-by stopped and 
incredulously peered at the remarkable planter, which had a splendid array of 
real natural vegetation and vines growing above the dwarfed synthetic greenery.

In conjunction with the late ‘60s ecology fad, Bob Gordon and Ron LeFey took two 
conservation-minded biology classes on a school-sponsored three-day camping trip 
to a lake located twenty miles from the high school. Tim Carley and I drove out 
to the lake the second night to see how the contemporary Thoreaus were doing. 
When we arrived at our destination larking students were chasing each other 
through the briars while others were already paired off and passionately necking 
under tall pine trees. Tim noticed a mixed group' of students dash into the 
woods and the errant students immediately vanished to avoid the detection of the 
two old-fashioned newly arrived conservative visitors.

"I hope those students don't eat any poisonous mushrooms!" Tim exclaimed after 
witnessing the sudden exodus into the forest.

"I think the students are more interested in basic biological pursuits than in 
honest intellectual ecological inquiry!" I replied.

About the only souls in the immediate environment that Tim and I could locate 
were Bob Gordon and Ron LeFey, the organizers of the frolicking nature study 
junket. The curfew was supposed to be ten' o clock, but the dials of my trusty 
Timex accurately read 11:30.

"The students are really infected with the pioneering spirit now," I jested to 
Bob and Ron as Tim laughed his rear end off. "What happened to the Conestoga 
wagons?" I joked as I watched silhouettes darting in and out of the distant 
foliage.

"It looks like a screwed-up primitive Sadie Hawkins Day with a surplus of Little 
Abners and Daisy Mays," Tim Carley added while still laughing. "But it's about 
equal the number of boys chasing after girls and the number of girls chasing 
boys!"

Bob Gordon was more optimistic than we were and attributed the excessive chaos 
we were witnessing to something else. "Guys, it's just the first time these 
students have had any freedom on their own," he generalized. "They simply don't 
know how to act when not under their parents' domination!"

"I'm glad I'm only a social studies teacher and don't have to teach wild life!" 
Tim amusingly interrupted his favorite faculty pal.

"These sensational student shenanigans do look a little Saturnalian to the, 
pardon the expression, to the naked eye!" I calmly stated to the two embarrassed 
and slightly chagrined chaperones.

With two reinforcements from the high school faculty on hand, Bob and Ron with 
the assistance of Tim and myself' rounded up the revelers and herded them back 
into their respective gender-separated designated cabins.

But before the students had been officially returned to their particular corrals 
Bob Gordon had taken the time to smear butter on all the bunk bed sheets in the 
four student cabins of the kids that had been assigned to his custody. After his 
students tramped into their cabins for the night devilish Bob sternly entered 
each logged building and reprimanded his underlings a cabin at a time for their 
aberrant conduct cavorting around in the pine-barrens forest. "I didn't 
appreciate your Pan-like goofing off one bit!" he yelled out in relation to the 
students' wild gamboling. "Now get to bed in a hurry and I don't want to hear 
one peep outa' any of ya' for the rest of the night!" he vehemently snarled.

The students under Bob's care washed up and when they slid under their 
bedcovers, a low chatter could be discerned outside the cabins as the victimized 
students accused each other of skullduggery. Bob Gordon pretended to be angry 
after hearing the recriminations being volleyed back and forth. He opened the 
cabin door and rebuked the chatterers, "What's wrong with you imbeciles!" he 
boomed. "I just yelled at ya' for foolin' around in the woods! Don't you kids 
have any sense of shame?" Bob screamed at his doubly startled prodigies.

When Bob left the third cabin after hollering at his students Tim Carley said, 
"Well Bob, I'm sure glad to see that you know how to butter up your advanced 
learners!"

"You leave little margarine for error!" I added referring to the butter spread 
in the bed sheets.

"Those kids will blame each other all night long and never suspect that Mr. 
Gordon would play such a dastardly prank!" Ron LeFey laughed.

"Yeah, it's almost like Smokey the Bear moonlighting as an arsonist or George 
Washington turning turncoat for the redcoats!" the amused sophomore history 
teacher stated. "Somebody's got to get back at these kids for all the crap they 
pull on us!" Bob Gordon summarized. "So I've deputized myself a one-man 
vigilante committee!"

Being an accomplished prankster sometimes has its pitfalls as Bob Gordon once 
found out. Every Halloween the sophomore social studies' teacher would 
unexpectedly dart into a classroom where I would be permanent subbing and Mr. 
Gordon would be wearing a dreadful-looking Dracula mask. The unexpected 
intrusion would startle the wits out of even the most bored students.

I thought that Bob's Halloween caper was amusing so I always kept a Frankenstein 
mask in the desk of the room where I was subbing. And towards the end of October 
when the students would be busy taking a test or doing a worksheet I would get 
the mask out of the desk and hide it under my sport jacket. Then I would put the 
mask over my face in the back of the room and walk around until the first 
student (usually a female) would see me, become frightened and then let out a 
shrill shriek. So when Bob Gordon would unexpectedly enter the same classroom a 
day later wearing the grotesque Dracula mask the students believed that the 
entire faculty was going off the deep end.

The laws of karma however have a way of boomeranging when one' least expects a 
negative consequence to happen. One Halloween afternoon Bob Gordon was driving 
his red Volkswagen home from the high school. The sophomore social studies 
teacher had the bad habit of attempting to scare adults he knew with his hideous 
Dracula mask (besides startling his students).

Bob's red Volkswagen was approaching a very friendly school-crossing guard that 
always enjoyed waving greetings at motorists and exchanging pleasantries with 
pedestrians. When the red foreign car neared the woman traffic director Mr. 
Gordon donned his frightening Dracula mask.

As the red Volkswagen slowly passed by the pleasant crossing-guard Bob let out a 
ferocious growl that immediately stunned the woman. However, as Bob removed his 
mask to reveal his true identity to the shocked guard his small vehicle was 
still advancing forward keeping pace with the slow-moving road traffic. A town 
garbage truck turned the intersection corner and Bob's red Volkswagen plowed 
into it as Gordon was exposing his true identity to the amiable crossing-guard. 
The total damage amounted to four-hundred-dollars and ironically, the next day 
at school Mr. Gordon told everyone in the faculty room that his costly 
impractical joke turned out to be a "smashing success."

Jim Kyle wanted to get even with Bob Gordon for drowning his seven tropical fish 
and for warping his only remaining razor blade. Bob was a big citizen-band-radio 
operator and would talk incessantly over his CB with big-rig truckers and other 
radio-talking enthusiasts.

Tim Carley, Jim Kyle and I pulled up in front of Bob's condominium with a 
walkie-talkie that was electronically set to communicate with Bob's CB. We sat 
in Tim's car and Jim disguised his voice with a handkerchief while conversing 
with Bob. But Mr. Gordon was slightly paranoid and thought that other CBers and 
the FCC might be monitoring his transmissions so he practiced keeping all his 
conversations over the airwaves clean and free of foul language.

Jim's walkie-talkie in the car could send and receive to Bob's CB in his condo', 
but no one else could hear Jim's transmissions except Gordon on his receiver. 
All other CBs were out of range and could only hear Bob Gordon speaking, but 
talking to no one that was communicating back.

"Well Bob," Jim said over his walkie-talkie, "how the hell are ya'!"

"Hey, who is this anyway!" Bob barked into his CB microphone. "Watch your 
language!"

"I've been listening to your bullshit over the CB for years," Jim indicted, "and 
everyone I know thinks you're totally full of crap. Why don't ya' just piss off 
and leave everybody the hell alone!"

"Hey, what's your handle?" Bob demanded to his entire CB audience. "Who are 
you?"

"Do I sound like a pot? I don't need a damned handle! And I don't like talkin' 
to stupid assholes," Jim enunciated into the speaker through his handkerchief 
while Tim and I were biting our tongues to avoid splitting our guts. "I thought 
you had balls Gordon! You're probably even friggin' scared of the damned FCC!"

"You can lose your license talking foul language like that!" Bob yelled to 
everyone out there operating a CB on or near his popular frequency. "Stop with 
the obscene language already!"

The three of us sat in Tim Carley's car and laughed our rear ends off as we 
watched Bob Gordon's silhouette pacing back and forth in front of his sheer 
drapes. After a few minutes other CBers were calling Bob and asking him why he 
had been talking to himself. Tim backed his auto' up and after we left the 
condominiums' asphalt driveway the navigator put his headlights on and drove Jim 
and me to the nearest tavern to enjoy some good roast beef' sandwiches and 
several cold mugs of tasty brew.

A guidance counselor with curly hair named Mark Singleton looked just like a 
junior student Ken Tomasini. So every time Mark would come into the faculty 
lounge and sit in a chair Bob Gordon would sit down right next to the guidance 
counselor and say to me, "Hey J.W., do you know a student named Ken Tomasini!"

I knew that Bob was actually referring to the physical similarity between Mark 
Singleton and Ken Tomasini, but Mark thought that Mr. Gordon was simply engaging 
in his typical zany frivolity.

"No Bob," I would say with a stoical look on my face, "tell me more about this 
student Ken Tomasini!"

Bob Gordon would always talk about imaginary places whose names he would 
creatively make up. "Well J.W., for your information Ken Tomasini has been 
accepted at the Driftwood Naval Academy up in East Squirrelsneck, Pennsylvania." 
Then Bob Gordon turned to Singleton and said to the look-alike guidance 
counselor, "Say Mark, do you know a kid named Ken Tomasini!"

"No I don't!" Mark answered while holding a morning newspaper in front of his 
face. "I'm in charge of all the students whose last names range from A to G!"

"Oh, okay!" Bob solemnly answered. "I meant to tell ya' that Ken Tomasini's been 
accepted at the Driftwood Naval Academy up in Squirrelsneck, Pennsylvania!"

"Ya' don't say!" Mark Singleton reflexively replied.

I was holding back laughing so hard that I thought my kidneys were both going to 
burst. I got up from my chair and made a beeline for the Men's Lavatory just in 
time to make it to the urinal.

Dean Miles was an affable general science and environmental science' teacher on 
the high school faculty. Miles possessed an abundance of trust in his students 
and was always optimistic with the glass being half-full all of the time instead 
of always half' empty. Mr. Miles strongly believed in a permissive classroom 
atmosphere where students could ramble around from experiment to experiment 
giving their input and advice to their comrades. "Student freedom is necessary 
for kids to grow up becoming mature thinkers and eventually realizing their own 
potential and also achieving their own destinies," Dean once preached to me in 
the faculty room.

"That approach works with small classes with honor students," I answered, "but I 
don't think it would be too practical trying it with unmotivated general 
students. Say Dean, what college department are you in charge of anyway?"

A narrow creek ran parallel to the high school property and the recent ecology 
trend in late ‘60s education promoted the preservation of the natural 
environment. Dean Miles ambitiously organized a student cleanup program that 
would purge the stream of litter and debris. Assisted by a crew of conscientious 
select science students, Miles and his disciples diligently converted the half-
mile-long murky creek and its bramble banks into an attractive brook-like 
setting.

"Do you now see what a team of motivated students can accomplish?" Dean Miles 
informed me at lunchtime in the faculty room. "All I had to do was establish the 
goal and then set them free to attain it any way they wanted!"

"I don't trust human nature quite as much as you do," I suspiciously maintained. 
"Over the summer the stream will again become polluted with litter despite the 
fact that your environmental students have wonderfully cleaned up the place 
three times each week."

"I'm even having trash barrels installed every hundred feet to cut down on the 
random litter!" Mr. Miles related.

Three days later before school some of the more humanitarian students 
transported six full-barrel-waste cans from the sides of the creek and then 
maliciously hurled the metal cylinders loaded with debris into the formerly 
pristine stream.

Tim Carley and I parked our cars in the teachers' lot between the high school 
and the creek and then walked over to talk with Dean Miles, who suddenly 
appeared quite disillusioned. The metal trash receptacles were bobbing up and 
down in the water. I suggested to Mr. Miles, "Maybe the students are studying 
Virginia Woolf's Stream of Consciousness literary technique in senior English."

"Yeah Dean," Tim Carley pitched in. "The students might be integrating English 
with ecology!" he offered. "Whoever did this to your stream has really gotten 
into the swim of things, wouldn't you say?"

Dean Miles did not savor Tim's remarks or my comment very much. The stealthy 
student vandalism triggered off a good deal of faculty banter that Mr. Dean 
Miles had to suffer. Poor Mr. Miles had to endure incessant jesting from his 
peers about his major twentieth century contribution to American education, "The 
Barrel-Stream Concept of Learning and Talking Trash!"

Tim Carley had a reputation for being a fair but tough history teacher that did 
not tolerate student dereliction. One fine morning he stepped from his home to 
his car to find several gallons of paint splattered on the hood and trunk. By 
coincidence the history instructor had failed several students the previous 
marking period and Tim interpreted that the ugly vandalism had been deliberately 
targeted at him. The school administration didn't want to get involved in the 
case because the destruction had not occurred on school property. So Mr. Carley 
had a good idea who had performed the acts but the suspected perpetrators had 
influential parents and relatives in the community and also connections with 
school board members.

Miss Presti was another victim of student retribution. The English instructor 
had made the mistake of not locking her car in the B-Wing parking lot. When she 
returned to the parking lot after school she found a dozen egg yokes staining 
the upholstery of her new sedan. Another time Miss Presti was having nighttime 
conferences with concerned parents on Teacher/Parent Conference Night. When she 
returned to her car after thirty exhausting ten-minute conferences all four 
tires on her auto' were deflated. Destructive students ought to find more 
constructive ways to air their opinions and frustrations.

John Taylor taught math and had the displeasure of walking out to the parking 
lot after school one Wednesday only to find a gaping hole in his car's rear 
window. Another time John's auto' wouldn't start because a number of wires in 
his engine had been mysteriously disconnected and severed.

Phil Tweston was a well' mannered man that demanded strict self-discipline from 
his students. The students mischievously called him "Stone Face" after some of 
Phil's literature classes had read Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic tale "The Great 
Stone Face."

One Saturday night Phil was sitting in his living room with his wife when the 
town rescue squad burst into his house with a stretcher and respiratory 
apparatus. The paramedics were very seriously responding to a crank phone call 
about an emergency heart attack victim at Phil's residence. After the incident 
Mr. Tweston confided that "Someone should never live in the town in which he or 
she teaches." Phil along with other teachers also frequently complained about 
anonymous phone calls at all hours in the morning. And this was in the early 
‘70s before American society became even more dysfunctional than it is today.

Jack DeCicco was really revered by other faculty members mostly because he had 
taught most of them or at least one of their parents through rough times during 
the ‘40s and ‘50s. The French and Spanish instructor was a carryover from the 
past that instructed his foreign language students on the same staff as veteran 
teachers Bill Catello and Charles B. Sipley. I always enjoyed listening to Jack 
DeCicco's stories that focused on the past.

One time Jack related that he was on his way home from teaching at the old high 
school in the 1940s when he was stopped on the highway by state policemen and 
told to get out of his car and help firefighters combat a raging forest fire.

"Didn't you have a choice in the matter?" I asked Jack. "I don't think that 
today the state police could get away with making someone involuntarily do 
something against his will!"

"Back in those days it was part of a citizen's civic responsibility to chip in 
and help whenever requested to do so by someone in authority!" Jack respectfully 
replied. "And that's the way it was in the old days! People respected and obeyed 
authority and gladly assumed responsibility when asked to help out!"

I always regarded Jack as a noble and distinguished man and it was sad that he 
was close to retirement in 1968. He still possessed a great fervency for his 
foreign language subjects and for the art of teaching. But unfortunately for Mr. 
DeCicco in 1968, times were changing and students were changing too with the 
Vietnam War protest movement gaining momentum. In addition to being gray-haired 
and elderly in appearance Jack was short in stature and a trifle bulging around 
his waist.

When Jack was assigned to the doom of cafeteria mass study hall patrol several 
of the more fiendish male demons hibernating in the mass educational study hall 
wasteland showed little homage for either age or decency. They would 
deliberately call Jack "meatball" and "old geezer" whenever he walked by the 
students' tables.

When I was permanent subbing on cafeteria mass study hall duty with Jack I would 
shudder upon hearing the ugly adolescent disrespect being mumbled and muttered 
in his direction. The man had dedicated his entire adult life to the education 
of youth and some of those audacious imbeciles in the mass cafeteria study hall 
(around eighty kids) were brazenly ridiculing the fine teacher that had devoted 
his entire professional energy to student betterment.

I had to control myself and show cool self-restraint because my first instinct 
was to grab one or two of the juvenile fools and bash their skulls against the 
cafeteria's tan-painted cinderblock walls.

Either Jack or I would eventually escort two or three of the impudent clowns 
down to the vice-principal's office and write out Discipline Referral Cards on 
the uncivilized renegades. The punks would then receive two or three days of 
Office Detention and of course some unfortunate teachers would have to be 
punished after school sitting in the atonement room for forty-five minutes with 
them.

Jack DeCicco despised both cafeteria duty and the mass study halls because he 
only wanted to teach good kids in French and Spanish classes of fifteen or so 
students. He even requested an extra teaching period to avoid the horrendous 
"mass duty periods" and the administration finally granted Jack's wish the last 
two years of his teaching career.

Jack once told me something during a teacher lunch period that has stuck in my 
mind. "Years ago the teachers didn't have community respect back in the ‘40s and 
the ‘50s," he began, "but at least the kids respected us. They saw the value of 
education while their parents mostly worked with their hands in local factories 
and resented teachers since they thought we never got our hands dirty," Mr. 
DeCicco noted. "Today teachers neither have community respect nor student 
respect either! That's the big difference between 1948 and 1968!"

Jack then told me that even in the "old days" a teacher's life was never peaches 
and cream. He had been assigned to volunteer and collect gate money for high 
school football games without pay as part of his professional duty as a teacher. 
Cash wasn't too readily available in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s. And when Jack 
first started teaching, the board of education paid him and his colleagues in 
script, which was a promise of salary that was honored by town pharmacists, 
barbers, doctors, retail stores and other businesses and services during the 
tough times before and during World War II.

Mrs. Finnian was another teacher on the high school faculty who was ready to 
retire. Her starting salary was $1,200.00 and was paid in script or a board of 
education' "I owe you!" as she called it. To secure a teaching position in the 
system, Mrs. Finnian had to orally agree to purchase a new automobile from a 
school board member that also coincidentally owned a local retail car 
dealership. The acquisition had cost Mrs. Finnian an entire year's salary, but 
that's the way educational politics worked in small towns during and right after 
the 1930s' Great Depression.

In 1968 Mrs. Finnian had failed several students second marking period in Math' 
and in Algebra. Upon entering her B-Wing class- room between the changing of 
classes, the elderly woman noticed that her grade book and her attendance record 
book had been pilfered. And upon going to the teacher parking lot after school 
Mrs. Finnian's car would not start. It was soon towed to a town garage and the 
mechanics found a mixture of sand and sugar in the gas line.

The administration did not want to get the police involved because of the bad 
publicity a police report would generate in local newspapers. So Mrs. Finnian 
had to quietly absorb the expense for the damage to her car's engine herself' 
and re-do her roll book and her attendance record journal for the reticent but 
authoritative administration.

European students that immigrated to America were amazed at the amount of 
irreverence directed toward teachers by rebellious and obnoxious kids that had 
grown up in this country. Bill Catello summed it all up rather nicely. "J.W.", 
he said, "we can thank the community for the remnants of teacher serfdom we now 
experience daily, and we can thank educational psychology for the disrespect we 
get from students. The rules of the game have changed since when I started out 
in this profession," Bill articulated. "Teachers must respect and must be 
courteous to all kids but all kids don't have to reciprocate! It's no longer a 
level playing field!"

Over the years school authority has been transferred from teachers to school 
specialists like principals, vice-principals and guidance counselors. The 
teacher is still a generalist as he or she was back in the 1930s. But now 
teachers are the vulnerable prey of certain nasty students, of certain irate 
parents of nasty students, of cloud-nine college professors, of amateur school 
board members and of bungling/public-relations-minded school administrators. 
Some may consider my position on this matter as being "cynical or 
unprofessional," but I maintain that teachers have never been professional 
people during the last century in the taxpayers' eyes.

The daily activity of being permanent subs' was a challenge to Bill Catello and 
me. We both preferred the euphemism "special assignment teacher," only because 
it sounded more professional than the appellation "permanent substitute" did. 
Bill was getting weaker with each passing day so he decided to call it quits and 
retire before cancer made him "die on the job" as he put it. In June of 1970 the 
frugal-minded board of education and the administration agreed to eliminate two 
of the four permanent substitute positions in the school district. "One from the 
elementary school and one from the high school must go!" the principal told me.

I saw the writing on the wall that soon all four permanent sub' teaching 
positions would be eliminated. ‘It was a real innovation of this school system 
having four certified teachers as subs and now it's being junked for the sake of 
saving taxpayers' dollars!' I realized and concluded.

I also finally surmised that teachers were regarded as expendable entities 
regardless of one's worth to the system, one's personal dedication or one's 
total contributions. The administration and the board of education believed that 
replacing any teacher was as easy as removing a dead light bulb and then 
twisting a replacement in the temporarily empty electrical socket. ‘No matter 
how a person looks at it, in the end the teacher will get screwed (or 
unscrewed),' I concluded.

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