Our own "Mr. Holland"

There are many movies about teachers out there, and I've seen quite a few of them. Probably my favorite one that I have seen is "Mr. Holland's Opus", about a frustrated composer who ends up taking what he thinks will be a temporary job teaching High School music, but that ends up being his career. After 30 years, budget cuts force him to retire when the music program is eliminated from the school where he has taught for decades. He is angry and realizes that this is all he has ever wanted to do, to mold young minds, to foster a love of music in them. The final scene is a farewell program held for him in the school auditorium where many alumni of his classes return and who have gone on to all kinds of careers and lives, and they perform the piece that he has been working on for nearly his entire life. It's a real tear jerker to see how much this teacher became beloved by his students and his fellow staffers as well, and what a huge impact he had on so many lives. This morning, I attended a farewell for a beloved High School teacher of mine who died last month, Mr. Roberts. I never took any of his classes (much to my later regret), but I did get involved in the theatre and was in several plays and built sets for others. I was also made the assistant director for the fall play of my senior year. I was over the moon about that opportunity and it gave me the chance to learn directing side by side with someone of vast experience that served me really well later on in college as a Theatre major, something that I would never have taken up had it not been for Mr. Roberts. Another time, I walked into the scene shop one early Saturday morning, and Mr. Roberts came up to me and said, "Build me an Oscar Statue!" Huh? I was a bit taken aback. ME? I muttered something about, well, it's my sister who is the artist, not me, and, um, well....REALLY? He seemed to see something in me that I did not see myself. He was utterly confident that I could do this. I'd always enjoyed building stuff, to where my younger sister used to jokingly call me "wires 'n' pliers". I built cages for rabbits, guinea pigs, mice, built stuff for my older sister's goats, and somehow, Mr. Roberts managed to find out that I had a knack for building things and decided that I was just the person to build this life sized "Oscar statue" for him. 8 hours, much sweat and hard work later, I had it finished. I was so proud of my efforts and so was he, to where it was preserved and put in a little museum of set pieces that were kept after each show.

When I got to college, I started out as a Journalism major, but soon feel under the spell of the theatre. I didn't do very well in journalism my first quarter and I landed a small part in a play almost right off the bat, so at the end of the quarter, I changed my major to Theatre. I briefly went back to Journalism in my Junior year, realizing that, as graduation was growing closer, I should be majoring in something more practical that could land me a job, but the theatre held such a powerful sway over me and I so desperately missed my classmates and professors that I returned to my beloved major and ended up with my degree in that field. I only ever had one lead part in a play, that being a one-act in High School. In college, I mostly landed bit parts, but I did the musical arrangements for Shakespeare's "As You Like It", probably the biggest thing I got to do while a college Theatre major. I spent two years in a traveling children's theatre company during my Junior and Senior years, which was great fun, and we got to travel to grade schools in disadvantaged areas that would not normally have access to that sort of thing. It was a marvelous experience that opened my eyes to working with disadvantaged people, something I ended up taking into my career from which I just retired recently, so that experience served me extremely well. But none of that would have happened in the first place had one unassuming teacher in High School not extended his hand and invited me into his world of theatre. As one old friend put it today in the service, Mr. Roberts was "the most generous audience member who ever lived". As long as you were willing to show up and be willing to dream, he was there to let you take the lead while showing you how to do it. He would see things in shy persons like me and others that we did not know that we had inside of ourselves that showed us that we could do things that we could never have imagined possible. That's such a rare gift, and one I could never thank Mr. Roberts enough for giving me. He was our High School's version of the beloved character "Mr. Holland" in the movie "Mr. Holland's Opus". Lives were forever changed because of the impact that he had on them. We should all be so fortunate to aspire to have as our own legacy the chance to change lives like he did. Bless you, Mr. Roberts., for opening a door to me that might otherwise have remained closed had  you not been there to offer an inviting hand.