This photo comes from the year Dad was the clerk of the Branch School Board, and bids were being submitted for the new school. Mr. Burns drove a white-over-gold Dodge Polara with a big V-8. I have never forgotten seeing him speed down Huasna Road toward the four corners–he had to be doing 70 mph–because his passenger, picked up at the County Airport on Edna Road, was a construction company comptroller trying to get his boss’s bid in on time.

I don’t know whether the guy made it.

This article, from June 1961, cites Mr. Burns, my big brother and my Dad—and Mrs. Vard (Gladys) Loomis, who would’ve been a dignitary to us. She was a woman of great dignity, so the term “dignitary” fits exactly. The ceremonies were at the IDES Hall because the old 1880s two-room schoolhouse couldn’t hold any more kids–we were Boomers, after all, and there were immense and inconvenient numbers of us—so the big kids, 7th and 8th graders, had their classes at the Hall until the new school could be built.

I wish this story had a happy ending. It doesn’t. Midway through one school year, Mr. Burns was fired. I’m still not sure of the cause, and I don’t want to know. No one talked about it then, and I don’t want to talk about it now. It may have involved his corporal punishment of a student who refused to do her homework. I don’t think that was the case because, just a few years before, I’d seen two Branch teachers, Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Fahey, work over Danny Hunt in the hallway of the old school. They used those hardwood rulers with the sharp copper inserts along the edges and Danny was crouched in the fetal position–and whimpering–while two teachers I loved worked him over like Bad Cop-Bad Cop. To say that I was shaken is an understatement. That was sixty years ago.

Nothing happened to them. Those were less litigious days, and country schools were their teachers’ fiefdoms.

So maybe Mr. Burns did something even worse than what the article below suggests.

It’s absurd, of course, but I’ve been trying to look for him for years. I think I have an obituary, in Los Angeles, but I’m not sure of it. I think I have a wedding, in Monterey, in 1976, and she is lovely in her high school yearbook photo. It might just be the same William Edward Burns–the age, 36, fits. She is Marcia Katherine Ross, 25, and the two were married the day after Christmas.

And, of course, this couldn’t be Mrs. Burns, not at all. I don’t have any conclusive proof of what happened to him–or even any conclusive proof that he was heterosexual, which is irrelevant– not even after years when I periodically take time to look for him on genealogical and newspaper websites.

The point remains: He screwed up. He did something I never would’ve done as a teacher.

Mr. Koehn replaced him–he would be my algebra teacher later, in ninth grade, on Crown Hill, which remains the only year in my formal education that I enjoyed math. He decided, in P.E. to introduce us to golf and brought thirty aged short irons, some with wooden shafts, and a hundred whiffle golf balls to school and we fifth and sixth graders had the time of our lives, swinging without mercy. Our beloved bus driver and custodian, Elsie Cecchetti, was less than thrilled with the divots that swinging without mercy leaves behind. Many years later, when I took my students to Normandy and we saw the enormous craters left by the D-Day gunfire of Allied naval ships, I was suddenly reminded of what we kids had done to Branch School’s front lawn.

We missed Mr. Burns, though. He was charming and unforgiving, inspirational and demanding, sometimes generous and sometimes mean.

But my family, including my big sister, who taught with him at Branch, loved him. My big brother and I loved him because of his intelligence, his wit and his passion–and, frankly, because he was the first male teacher we’d ever had.

And what this flawed man wrote in that old Thesaurus remains one of the greatest gifts of my life:

Someday I expect to read great things by you.