My Little Town 20110315: Elwood Brockman

(8 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Those of you that read this irregular series know that I am from Hackett, Arkansas, just a mile of so from the Oklahoma border, and just about 10 miles south of the Arkansas River.  It was a redneck sort of place, and just zoom onto my previous posts to understand a bit about it.

I never write about living people except with their express permission, so this installment is about a long dead denizen of Hackett.  This time it is about a teacher of mine, Elwood Brockman.

Mr. Brockman taught high school maths, and was also the grade school principal.  Since the entire school system from grades 1 to 12 (no K at the time), double duty was the norm.

I know very little about Mr. Brockman’s early life, as he came to Hackett when he was over 60 years old.  I do know that he was highly educated.  I know that he taught chemistry in his earlier career, because he had a LOT of high school chemistry texts, some of which were evaluation copies from the publishers.  He taught only maths at Hackett, at least formally.

He was also a licensed land surveyor, and as a matter of fact would hire my cousin, Mike, to help him carry the transit, poles, and such on jobs.  My impression is that Mr. Brockman had quite the drinking man earlier in life, because even as a kid I could hear my parents talking about whether someone “like him” should be able to teach.  In any event, the school board hired him and he turned out to be an outstanding teacher.  As I got older he and I sort of developed an affection for each other, which I shall describe later.

He first came to town around 1966 or so, when I would have been nine.  He was single and smoked cigarettes in his office.   They cost thirty-five cents per pack then, and it was cool at the time to smoke just about anywhere.  He lived in the house just south of me that had an apartment with a separate entry.  Mr. and Mrs. Holloway owned the house, and I shall write about them in a future installment.

As I got older, Mr. Brockman noticed that I had an unusual interest in science.  He had several copies of a paperback textbook about atomic orbitals and quantum numbers, and offered to teach about them to any students after school, and free of charge who were interested.  Maybe five or so of us took him up on it, including my friend Rex.  I think that Rex made it at the most to three of the sessions, one other kid to two, and the rest except for use never came back after the first ones.  I LOVED it!  I ate this stuff up like candy.

Before long, after the others quit coming, Mr. Brockman and I could often cover two or three lessons in an hour and a half or two.  By the time that we were finished, I knew about the major electronic atomic shells, the suborbitals, and the quantum numbers associated with them and what they meant.  Perhaps this does not sound very remarkable, but this could have been no later than 1970, so I was at the most 13 years old, and I think that is was in 1968 when I would have been 11.  Mr. Brockman became sort of a scientific mentor to me at that time.

He sort of looked like W. C. Fields, with the bulbous nose and wild shock of hair.  He certainly was not what one you would call a fit person, with quite a paunch.  As I visualize him now, I can see him just as he was.  He was quite like an uncle to me, if one happened to have Linus Pauling as an uncle.  I am sure, but have absolutely no evidence to back this up, that he was the one who put the idea in my parents’ heads to take me out of the Hackett School System and send me to the Catholic school in Fort Smith, Saint Anne’s High School, which only recently had become coeducational.

Our relationship did not end there.  Mr. Brockman had cataracts, and at the time the treatment was not anything like it is now.  After his operation, to see properly he had to wear both hard contact lenses (the soft ones were still under development at the time) and thick glasses.  Sometimes he would “lose” a hard lens in his eye, and could not see well enough with the other one to extract it.  The telephone would ring, and if I did not answer it myself, my mum or dad would tell me that Mr. Brockman needed me to help him to “find” his lens.

I NEVER felt put upon to walk over to his apartment and assist him, and this still was going on after I started Saint Anne’s.  I did not care if it were raining, cold, or whatever.  I would go and climb the stairs to his apartment, which he never locked, knock, and he would tell me to come in.  He would always be at his bureau, with the magnifying mirror in front of him, tearing profusely, trying to find that lens.  He had a little, white lens grabber, basically a rubber cup on a hollow handle that was shaped that, when the handle was squeezed and then released, the lens would be gently suctioned to the cup part.

After a couple of trips, I learnt that he almost always “lost” his lens under his lower eyelid.  Because of his vision, he just could not see to extract it.  I know that this is very painful, because I later wore hard lenses, and getting one “lost” under your upper lid is bad enough, but getting one stuck under your lower lid is excruciating!  Before long, I would have the lens on the suction device, and he would breathe a breath of relief.  By the way, of all the times that I went over there, I never saw any booze, never smelt any, he never did anything that could remotely be considered anything like a sexual come on.  He was not like that, at least towards me.

I guess my parents finally decided that someone “like him” could have some redemption.  My cousin Mike worked with him for years and there was never anything untoward by Mr. Brockman.

I have a few other recollections.  He drove a green Dodge Dart, year model unknown.  It looked and sounded terrible!  But it always got him to where he needed to go.  You always knew when Mr. Brockman was at school, because that bright green Dart would be there.  He liked to laugh, too.  He was not really a joke teller, but would spin amusing yarns.  He was also obviously educated in the classics.

Usually, at would be around seven in the evening if I needed to extract a contact lens, and often we would sit and talk for a few minutes, usually about science.  If he were particularly tired on a given evening, he would tell me, and I remember this just like he said it half an hour ago, ironic, since it is 7:33 as I write this paragraph, “David, I would love to talk, but the arms of Morpheus are rapidly wrapping around me.”  I did not know what it meant, and I think that he was challenging me to stretch, because he would always say, “You figure it out.”

I finally looked up Morpheus in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and learnt that he was the Greek god of sleep.  Elwood never spoonfed me information:  he wanted me to work for it.

Mr. Brockman died many years ago, but he is still alive in a sense, because Mike and I remember him fondly.  He was my very first scientific mentor.  Now, my mum and dad certainly encouraged me in education in general, but neither of them were in any people of science.  That is not intended to be in any way a ding towards then, so please do not get me wrong about them.  But Mr. Brockman was a scientist, was the first to begin to teach me how to think like a scientist.

Remember those high school textbooks that I mentioned a while ago?  He gave me a bunch of them, often marked up with what has to be fountain pen ink.  Except for family heirlooms, they are among some of my most prized possessions, even though that are not worth much insofar as money goes.  Sometimes the dollar value matters little.

I have another recollection about Mr. Brockman.  Once, in “downtown”, as much as a town of 328 on the city limit sign is, Bobby Bird wrecked his motorcycle in from of Gene and Katy’s (see an earlier installment) store.  Gasoline was everywhere, and along came Mr. Brockman, smoking a cigarette.  Bobby was hurting, but not really hurt, but did not want to get up off of the pavement.  In his unique way, Mr. Brockman said, “Boy, it really smells like gas here!  I hope that it does catch fire!  Boy, you would be burned up!”.  About that time he made the appearence of flicking his cigarette onto the ground.  You would be surprised how fast Bobby arose and WALKED!  It was like a miracle.  Thus was the wisdom of Mr. Brockman.

Well, this is a nice slice of My Little Town.  Some of the folks there were not so nice, many of them were just regular folks, and a few of them were downright criminal, and not the petty kind.  If you think that this series has merit, please respond in comments to let me know that you would like to know more.  I am one of the last to remember the way it was in the mid 1960s to mid 1970s, and enough of those folks are dead now that I will not embarrass anyone.

I also encourage you to talk about your little town, or even your big one, about growing up, whether you are 90 or 19.  Do you think that such a topic deserves a regular, weekly installment?  Or would a new group be better?  Hey, since my little town only had 328 folks in it, I shall run out of recollections before long.  I would be happy to edit a group with multiple contributors if there is any interest.  Please also comment on that.

Warmest regards,

Doc

Crossposted at Antemedius.com, Dailykos.com, Docudharma.com, and Fireflydreaming.com.