ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, March 21, 1996 TAG: 9603210057
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Beth Macy
SOURCE: BETH MACY
Dear Mr. Martin
I have just seen ``Mr. Holland's Opus,'' the movie about the inspirational high-school band teacher who ends his career by directing the symphony of his dreams. The movie reminded me of you, Mr. Martin - but not because you wrote your own musical score, or because you almost ran off with one of your star pupils in a moment of artistic passion. You did nothing of the sort.
Your corny jokes, your strict code of discipline, the way you shouted ``shave-and-a-haircut'' to count out musical time - none of these things would've played out on the big screen. Too small-town, too boring.
And definitely too true-to-life.
Nonetheless, when Richard Dreyfuss took that rhythm-impaired drummer aside - and spent hours drumming the beat into his head after school - I thought of you. I remembered the private lessons you gave me the summer of my 15th year, not because I needed help with rhythm but because we had fun playing together - you and your clarinet on the countermelody, me and my trumpet reaching for the high notes.
You, an old man peering down through bifocals with your black polished loafers tapping out the beat. Me, a young girl in tennis shoes - looking at sheet music instead of looking for trouble.
You weren't the best band conductor, and I wasn't the best trumpet player. But the music wasn't the point.
A few weeks ago, I spoke to a class of fifth-graders at Highland Park Elementary. When they asked how I came to be a journalist, I didn't tell them about my natural ability to get people to tell me things or my ``deathless prose,'' as my editor likes to call it, rolling his eyes.
I described the way Ms. Tabor made Shakespeare come alive for me in the 11th grade - simulating the witch-scene thunder in ``Macbeth'' by shaking a giant piece of metal in front of the class.
I told them about my college feature-writing teacher, Vicki Hesterman, who encouraged me to write about my father's death my junior year. She saw to it that the story got published in a national magazine, checking my first draft and 17th - and every misplaced comma in between.
I talked about the scrawled letters I still get from my news-writing teacher, Ray Laakaniemi (``Doc Laak,'' we called him), who at this very minute is somewhere in Russia on a Fulbright lectureship explaining the finer journalistic points of an inverted-pyramid lead.
But mostly I spoke of you, Mr. Martin: The time you chewed me out for cutting up during ``The Star Spangled Banner,'' the way you pounded your conductor's stick on the sheet music when people talked during class; the way you expected - no, commanded - great things of us all.
And the way you looked down your bifocals at me that summer, as if to say ``I'm watching you'' - when it felt like no one else was.
Teachers change lives, I tried to tell the fifth-graders. They are humanity's greatest public servants.
Behind all people who love their work - whether they be writers or executives, painters or cooks - there are teachers who inspired them when they needed it most.
You are the real Mr. Holland, Mr. Martin, as surely as that 15-year-old inside me is still tapping her tennis shoes, sometimes hitting the high notes and sometimes falling short - but always reaching.
LENGTH: Medium: 64 linesby CNB