Who was your favorite teacher? If you were like me, it would be the one you liked and trusted the most. My seventhgrade teacher was Leonard Ojala and my high school health and social studies teacher was Walt Salmi. He was unorthodox as he strayed from textbooks and talked to us like adults. We didn’t daydream because we didn’t want to miss anything he said.

On April 26 of this year, we again had a potluck lunch at the Willow Valley Club Hall. I started off showing my .22 single shot that I bought from Sears Roebuck for $12 when I was 12 years old. Allen Holmer showed his .22 single shot rifle that he bought from Sears for $12 too, back in 1951 when we were trapping weasels and peeling pulpwood to get the money. Kathy Stevenson showed the .22 that her dad used and that she shot partridges with when she was a kid.

But the thing I’ve wanted to do most of my life was to honor Mrs. Margaret Ward Novak. She was the teacher who taught us in our one-room school from first grade when we left home for the first time in our lives, to leave the Gheen School to go up to Orr for the seventhgrade.

She had the job of being our mother when we were away from home, teaching us to read, write, do arithmetic, and even teach some students to tie their shoes. Probably the best lesson she drilled into us was trust. She was softspoken and we learned to trust her. And over the next few years she trusted us too. She comforted crying “little people” as she administered first-aid to small cuts and bruises. She never called us kids. She never talked down to us. But she had her work cut out for her.

She taught us to obey and if we didn’t, she had us write that definition over and over again, and it worked. She had to teach reading for 10 minutes to each of the six grades for an hour. The same 10 minutes each for arithmetic, and 10 minutes to each grade for social studies, and so on for each subject. But like every parent, she had to balance everything and every decision for every different kid. So when we had a 10-minute recess time, the big kids watched the little ones on the playground while she corrected and recorded papers and did her required paperwork. When the bell rang, the kids ran in and we settled back in our desks again. The same thing at noon hour while she sat at her desk doing paperwork. When she went home each night, she had an armload of papers that didn’t go unnoticed by us kids. So it must have been a relief for her at the end of each year.

Our science lesson was maybe one a week, but all eyes and ears were learning the same thing. So by the time we were in the sixth grade, we had learned that there were 15 pounds of air pressure on the surface of the earth. And how air collapsed a maple syrup can when steam condensed and formed a vacuum. We had watched that experiment (demonstration) each year, so it was “old hat” when we grew up.

How could anyone forget Mrs. Novak?