My hayseed handicap

My hayseed handicap
By David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — A few unrelated events sent me back this week. First, there were indications all around town that a new school year was starting. This lent a measure of urgency to my dialog with a young barista at my morning coffee joint, named Tay, who was making a dubious college choice.

Third was an obituary in the Wisconsin State Journal. Tom Nissalke, a former National Basketball Association coach, had died at a ripe old age in Salt Lake City. I didn’t know Nissalke but I had always followed his career because his wife — who, as they say, “preceded him” to the grave — was my eighth-grade English teacher.

Nancy Nissalke was not my first English teacher at Franklin School. I had to be promoted into her class. Franklin, an elm-shaded red-brick cube of a school on the poor (south) side of Madison, was the best school I’d ever attended. Up to that point, most of education took place at St. Mary’s, a Catholic parish school in Tomah. My teachers there were very good. I loved at least one of them, Loretta Ducklow (4th grade) and hated another, Sister Mary Ann (7th grade). But a lot of my time there was wasted in catechism rote and Catholic historical propaganda (about the “Protestant Revolution” and such), not to mention a lost year of humiliation and naked spite (hers, not mine) under Sister Mary Ann.

Franklin was a startling upgrade in pedagogy. Every teacher had at least a bachelor’s degree. One of them, Mr. Barnett, taught science, a subject unheard of at St. Mary’s. There was also a gym where — for the first time in my life — I had physical education and showered with a couple dozen other boys, some black, some brown. This range of colors was new, too. And all these kids were “publics.” I’d learned at St. Mary’s that public schools harbored kids who were misguided, impious, presumptively damned and, occasionally, Jewish. They were a harsh and barbaric lot, held in check only by the tenuous strands of statutory restraint.

Franklin School saw me coming. Despite exemplary grades at St. Mary’s — even from the malignant Sister Mary Ann — Madison’s school authorities preemptively tracked me amongst the low achievers and future factory hands. Indeed, they had reason. Besides being even poorer than most of the minority students at Franklin, I was from Tomah, an “up North” hamlet infested with unschooled farmers, semi-literate hodcarriers and low-information lumberjacks.

In a sense, they were right to relegate me to second-class status, officially referred to as “eight-two.” I was the unpromising offspring of a housepainter/bartender and a waitress. My grandparents, aunts and uncles were farmers, plumbers, cobblers, barbers, machinists, GIs and chicken-shack carhops, none with more than a 12th-grade diploma. Not one grandparent had attended high school. Mom never finished Tomah High. And me? My outlook was appropriate. Once, I wondered whether, after (or if) I finished high school and went into the service — every boy went into the service — I might be able to work my way through a couple of years at the state college over in La Crosse, forty miles away in another solar system. For a Tomah kid, this sort of woolgathering qualified as wild conjecture. Growing up, the only kids I knew who expected schooling beyond Tomah High were the offspring of doctors, lawyers and Bernie Schappe.

At Franklin — and even moreso later at a high school named after “Fighting Bob” LaFollette — I found myself amongst kids no less proletarian and impoverished than me who were already anticipating a college degree. This was a university town. College wasn’t forty miles distant. It was all around us, insinuating itself into every local activity, into each household and every schoolkid’s psyche. The University was a sprawling empire of insistent learning that set the city’s tone and defined everyone’s expectations.

I felt no such expectations, however, until Mrs. Nissalke’s English class. Even though Franklin School, after one quarter, had changed its mind about my potential and re-labeled me an “eight-one,” I was timid among these city-smart kids. Was I over my head? Was Sister Mary Ann right? Before I departed St Mary’s, she had made it vividly clear that I — and my sister and brother — were dead-end trailer trash with a mother who had covered herself with shame and was bound straight to Hell in an express handcar, her three unwashed urchins in tow.

Mrs. Nissalke had a sense of my dilemma.

One day, she flipped through a series of book reports I’d turned in — I generated book reports at roughly the rate that rabbits generate little brown pellets — and told me I was selling myself short. She pointed out that, according to all the tests, my “reading level” was already beyond twelfth grade. So why was I stuck on young-adult adventure books by the immortal (but easy to read) Jim Kjelgaard?

“You can read anything,” she said. “You should challenge yourself more.”

Now, Mrs. Nissalke was blonde, beautiful, gentle, smarter than God and I was probably a teensy bit in love with her. Mind you, at age thirteen, I could not feel particularly carnal toward anyone so profoundly old. She was pushing thirty. Plus, she was a foot taller than me (I was a slow grower) and she outweighed me substantially. Dancing with her would have been a serious problem in physics. But I really liked her. Moved by her personal attention, I was suddenly, deeply desperate to prove myself.

So I read Moby Dick. All the way through. Fighting every dense page of digressive, Victorian prose night after night in the kitchen with my back stubbornly turned to the babbling television.

That’s how it happened, how I cured myself of my hayseed handicap. My shaky conquest of Herman Melville helped purge the lowered expectations that come from growing up in a town that makes La Crosse look like Manhattan and a certificate for completing the keypunch course at the vocational school over at the county seat seem the pinnacle of higher education in the western wilderness.

I read Moby Dick to please Mrs. Nissalke. But then I went on to write stories to please Mrs. Nissalke, who responded by laughing gorgeously and telling me that I had “a flair for writing.” I think I would have changed my attitude toward my future regardless of Mrs. Nissalke, because there were other teachers, at Franklin and LaFollette, who instilled me with great expectations. I accumulated friends, the sons and daughters of grocers and civil servants, professors and ne’er-do-wells, bartenders, housepainters and waitresses, who all expected to go on to great universities, and who expected to see me there alongside.

But — and I didn’t realize this ’til she was gone too far from my life to thank her — Nancy Nissalke was the angel who descended from out of the big-city blue and planted in my scrawny bosom the seed of hope… the wise, lovely blonde who lit my still-flickering spark of self-belief.