Pamela Hurley
I didn’t learn much in college.
But I learned a whole hell of a lot in high school, it made me who I am.
Now let me clarify that a bit. I did learn a lot in college. Just very little in class. Taught by professors who’d rather be somewhere else, pursuing glory in the world of their peers instead of slumming with the lowly students. It was almost all lectures all the time, and to say it was boring would be an understatement. But high school, those teachers were good!
Well, some of them. Very few of them. But they made up for all the losers.
Let’s go back to my freshman year. I’m blocking the name of my Algebra teacher. He was a nice enough guy, he went to Middlebury himself, but the class was so dry that I sat in the back of the room cracking jokes with my friend Russell from the projects, and completely missed the essence of the subject. Yup, I was doing Algebra by trial and error. X + 3 = 5? I got it, it’s 2! But when the numbers turned into fractions I could no longer come up with the answers, this teacher sent home a progress report that I was near failing and my parents flipped out. That’s how it was in the sixties, if your kid screwed up it was not the administration’s fault, but your progeny’s. Hell, I’d rather face the principal any day of the week as opposed to my parents.
They made me sit in the front row. I had to go for after class help. I barely squeezed by.
But the following year, for Geometry, I had Mrs. Spitalny. Who let us shoot water pistols in class, who let us throw snowballs, and I got an A+. I kid you not. No one could believe it, my old buddies taking the subject with my old teacher figured I was cheating, or grading was on a severe curve. But the following year, I had Mrs. Spitalny again, for Algebra II, and not only did I get an A+, I was one of only two students (both taught by Mrs. Spitalny) who got all forty questions right on the standardized test at the end of the year, the one all the students in my school took.
Then I had a different math teacher in my senior year and barely eked out a B.
Teachers count.
And I can count, because I had Mrs. Spitalny.
But the teacher I want to talk about here is Pamela Hurley. Mrs. Hurley. She was married to this hunk who showed up at school every once in a while. He accompanied us on field trips. She was twenty six, she had us reading Ferlinghetti.
Do they even teach Ferlinghetti anymore? Probably not in Texas. There’s no test on Ferlinghetti, there’s no race to the top. His poetry is about stimulating your brain as opposed to getting you ahead on the test.
And I remember Mrs. Hurley had the “Time” article about “Alice’s Restaurant” pinned to her bulletin board. And we went to New York to see “MacBird” and to see Janis Ian on Friday night, at what was then called Philharmonic Hall, now known as Avery Fisher Hall, in Lincoln Center.
And she drove a limo. A fifteen year old faded black Cadillac. She gave me a ride home one day, even though it was against the rules.
And if it sounds like I was the teacher’s pet and had a crush on Mrs. Hurley, you’ve got it wrong. Judd was the pet. And Mrs. Hurley had her unlovable side. When she would suddenly get strict. But I remember telling her that spring that her class was getting boring, it wasn’t as cool as it used to be. In today’s militaristic educational system, you can’t talk back, not with substance. There’s no heart, no soul.
But Mrs. Hurley was not the one who taught me to write. Oh, I remember performing in her classroom, reading Edgar Allan Poe by candlelight, but the teacher who taught me how to write was Mr. Harrity, in AP English, senior year. He’d just come back from sabbatical, he’d learned this new writing technique. Every day, for the first five minutes of class, we had to write, and if we ran out of things to say, we had to repeat the previous three words ad infinitum. That’s how I can type so fast, spit it out so quickly. You have to become one with the words, you have to let it flow. Once you self-edit, you lose it. As for all those people saying writing is rewriting…I feel sorry for them. Rewriting is so painful. And oftentimes, the more you change, the more you lose the essence. It’s about getting it right the first time. When you’re truly inspired. Capturing lightning in a bottle.
Not that Mr. Harrity taught me how to type. That was an elective I took. Thank god, especially in this computer era.
And Mr. Harrity truly didn’t teach me how to write. I believe that’s innate. You can go to the Iowa workshop, you can go to Breadloaf, but either you’re a writer or you’re not. Mr. Harrity just gave me a technique. He opened a door I could go through to find who I truly was.
Which flipped the people at Middlebury out. My creative writing teacher was agape. The prep schoolers in my seminar treated me like a pariah. No one had read Tom Wolfe, the New Journalism was already over, but at Middlebury it never happened. Hell, I’m more successful than John Clagett, who wrote bad sea stories no one read, ever was. That was my teacher.
Like I said. I learned almost nothing in college. You want to ignore most of your teachers. They want to eradicate your essence, not liberate it. If you’re learning the rules, you’re screwed, success in the arts is about questioning authority, doing it your way!
And Andrew Warde was just a public high school in Fairfield, Connecticut. Back when there was still enough money to pay for mimeo. Mmm, remember smelling that? Rich people drove Cadillacs. There was no such thing as NetJet. We were all in it together. You could create your own destiny.
But those days are through.
Hell, income inequality sucks. Broken homes affect kids emotionally. I remember Blaine, at Middlebury, his parents broke up first semester and Blaine promptly flunked out. The administration felt sorry for him, let him back the second semester, despite his not having finished the work of the first, but it didn’t matter, he never appeared on campus again after that spring. Oh, one time he came sliding through, years later, with all that extra weight he’d gained freshman year still intact.
We’ve got so many problems.
But first and foremost we need to tackle education. We need more money for schools. For not only teachers, but instruments. For music, for everything that’s not on the standardized test.
And the reason I’m writing all this is because of an e-mail I received today. Regarding Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I’ll print it below. It brought me back to Mrs. Hurley’s class.
At least I’ve got that memory.
Most people don’t.
From: Brad Parker
Re: Turn The PageWhen I finished my album, “Days Of Poetry.” I was in the Bay Area and went to City Lights. I was with my wife and daughter and told them I was going to leave a copy for Lawrence Ferlinghetti. They just shook their heads and laughed. The guy behind the counter looked at me incredulously and said everyone wants to do that. Then I told him a story about how I met Ferlinghetti in LA at a reading he gave at LACMA.
It was about 12 years ago and I took my wife and 2 daughters even though we did not have tickets. I met the woman in charge who was busy rebuffing the crowd demanding to be let in. I told her I knew how she felt since I had worked for Bill Graham for years in the Bay Area. She liked the girls and let us in at the very end. We got in the elevator and in came Lawrence and his entourage. I told him my first book of poetry was “A Coney Island Of The Mind.” and that the girls first book of poetry was the same one. He grinned and said hello and asked them about that. Saida said it was her birthday and this was the best gift. He had a bouquet of flowers given to him by the museum and he gave it to her. He then took us to sit on the front row. It was wonderful. So, after I told the counter guy my story he said, well that’s different, told me to write it on a paper book bag and put the CD in and he would see what he could do but no promises.
When I got home to LA, Lawrence had written me an email. He thanked me for putting poetry to music and creating songs, the highest form of poetry. I wrote to him to say that now I had completed the circle of inspiration and joined the ranks of the Radical Poets.
You keep the spirit alive Bob that we all rode on for so many years and still can if we are awake, vigilant and guided by our true voice in music above all else and for all others.
Keep up the good words my friend.
further.
Brad
p.s. I love that Seger song…
P.S. I’ve found my summer camp girlfriends, so many of the people I grew up with, online. But I’ve yet to find Pamela Hurley. I think she’s a teacher in Davie, Florida. But that might not be her. Googling is difficult with such a common Irish name.
P.P.S. Seeing the front cover of “A Coney Island Of The Mind” on the Wikipedia page brings me right back to 1967
P.P.P.S. Do you know the last seven seconds of “Society’s Child”? The keyboard explosion? It’s an encapsulation of the sixties, frenzied, untamable, without limits. The decade was about taking chances, expanding your mind. There’s nothing wrong with that. As a matter of fact, it’s the bedrock of life. Once upon a time there was an era when money was not king, when becoming a fully-realized person was the goal in life. Not a single person I went to college with had a meeting with a corporate recruiter. We wanted to graduate and experience life, not containment.
