The teacher who made it happen

At 23 and in her first teaching job, Shirley Wirth organized my first interview with a VIP

The Garfield Elementary fifth-grade class of Mrs. Wirth (far right) and Mr. Brown (far left), who handled math and science. That’s me, front row, third from the left. Two classmates who accompanied me to the interview were Mark Laswell, front row, second from the left, and Eric Brandt, in the third row, second student from the left. (Another classmate who went, Randy Young, isn’t in the photo.)

Note: For me, graduation always brings to mind teachers. So today’s column is dedicated to every teacher, or retired teacher, out there who wonders if they make or made a difference. For me, this teacher did, and I’m sure our readership is filled with others like her.

IT WAS THE 1964-65 school year. Beyond the suburban bliss of Corvallis, Ore., good and evil were at work in the world. As I biked half a mile to Garfield Elementary School for my first day of fifth grade, the ink was hardly dry on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that outlawed segregation in businesses such as theaters, restaurants and hotels (good). But the Vietnam War was escalating, particularly after the Gulf of Tonkin incident just a few weeks earlier (evil).

Not that I noticed. Before school I listened to a reel-to-reel tape I’d recorded from The Beatles’ appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” the previous February. My dreams were small; I someday wanted a Schwinn Sting-Ray bike. And I reveled in the latest craze that had rolled north from California: skateboards.

Once, when I came home from school, Mom wasn’t home. I walked across the cul-de-sac, knocked on the door of a neighbor and asked Mrs. Ankerberg if she would fix me a peanut butter and pickle sandwich. She happily did so.

Into this cocoon of innocence came my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Wirth. When you’re 11, teachers don’t have first names but I later learned it was Shirley. She was 23. Corvallis born and raised. In fact, I later learned, one summer she had, as a high schooler, babysat my sister and me when we were toddlers. Her father, Phil Smart, ran a men’s store downtown.

Shirley graduated from Oregon State, married a Corvallis High classmate, Don Wirth, in 1961 and spent two years in Germany where he was stationed with the army.

Our class at Garfield was her first teaching assignment. Because she was overseas, she couldn’t be interviewed but she had student-taught at the school and they liked what they saw. Shirley would make $4,822 for the year, plus $90 for supervising After School Sports.

She had red hair, was always composed and leavened her teaching with a sort of “Mary Tyler Moore Show” enthusiasm.

At Christmas, she invited all 30 of us to her and Don’s tiny apartment two blocks from our house for hot chocolate and caroling. In the spring, she invited our mothers to a luau. (The class was studying Hawaii.) We all wore leis, and I demonstrated “surfing” — skateboarding on my belly across the cafeteria floor while wearing my black-and-white surfer shirt and straw hat.

But what best defined Mrs. Wirth for me was an incredibly ambitious project she led in March 1965, sending us out in teams of three or four to interview people and write stories for our school paper, The Garfield Chatter. (If I’m not mistaken, at least three Heart, Humor & Hope subscribers were among those reporters: Loris (Itzen) Cook, Nancy (Amen) Fischer and Mark Laswell.)

Now, full disclosure: I was no rookie writer, even at 11. I had been a published author since age 7, thanks to my mother having sent the Corvallis Gazette-Times “Bobby’s Poim Aboot Christmas.” (Apparently back then I was a spelling-challenged Canadian.) The six-line “poim” included six misspelled words and ended with a metaphysical conundrum: “So when you see Santa Clos / Be sure you do not see him.” Otherwise, I pointed out, “he won’t give you inething.”

Don’t even try to figure out my thinking on this, my first published article.

My stories back then often had worrisome endings like this, some even tragic. One piece was about a coat, a flag, a record player and a piece of chalk in a classroom that continually complained about this and that. For example, the chalk complained that people just used him and made him smaller. The coat claimed someone “tried to hang him.”

“Be thankful for what you have,” I ended the piece with, “because the next day the school burned down.” (Yikes, didn’t see that coming, did you?)