One Shot at Forever (4 page)

In a town the size of Macon, the Shartzer incident naturally created a bit of a stir. In the teacher's lounge a few weeks later, Sweet was pouring a cup of coffee when Carl Poelker, the math teacher, ambled over.

“You hear about the kid up in Elwin last month?” Poelker asked.

Sweet said he hadn't. But as he listened to the story of how an eighth-grader had taken out a cop car going full speed from the top of a grain elevator, he had a very different reaction than most of the other teachers.

Now that
, Sweet thought,
is one helluva arm
.

3

Steve Shartzer arrived for his first day of English class during his sophomore year at Macon High to find a strange-looking teacher at the front of the room, back turned to the class, reading a newspaper. By now, Lynn Sweet bore little resemblance to the clean-cut young man who'd first moved to Macon nearly four years earlier. A thick Fu Manchu mustache curled over the corners of his lips; a pair of bushy sideburns dipped down his cheeks; and dark hair flopped across his forehead. He looked like an unkempt Beatle, one who in this case happened to be wearing an outlandish green corduroy blazer with a rainbow ribbon tacked to it.

Shartzer looked around for a desk but all he saw were four large, round tables, so he joined some of the two dozen other students at one of them. Behind him, the walls were plastered with posters: Mick Jagger in midserpent dance, Grace Slick in eyeliner, and a Ray-Banned Bob Dylan. In the corner stood two rows of bookshelves. One teemed with an eclectic collection of novels and short stories, many of which were rarely seen in a town like Macon. The other overflowed with magazines and comic books, everything from
Popular Mechanics
to
Spider-Man
. Conspicuously absent, either on Sweet's desk or the tables, were grammar textbooks.

Once everyone was seated, Sweet turned around.

“I'd like to start class with an exercise,” he said, brandishing the
Herald & Review
from the previous Sunday. “Who can tell me what
the most interesting part of the paper
is?”

Hands shot up.

“Sports?”

“Comics!”

Sweet shook his head. “Nope. It's the obituaries.”

There were puzzled looks. Sweet paused. “You know why? Because each one tells a life's story, right there in one column of the paper.”

And then Sweet began to read. He read about farmers who'd lived through World War I and women who'd raised nine children during the Depression. He talked about the scope of each life, about all the crazy, interesting things these people had done, of how much they'd
lived
.

When he was finished, he gave the class its assignment. “Now I want you to write your own obituary.”

There were giggles, but Sweet was serious. He told them to take out paper and a pencil.

A boy behind Shartzer raised his hand. “But Mr. Sweet,” he said. “How are we supposed to know how we're going to die?”

“You're not,” said Sweet. “How you die is the one thing you
don't
have control over. What you do have control over is the rest of your life. Write about how you want to live.” He paused, then smiled. “Have fun with it.”

And so they did. It was neither the first nor the last unconventional assignment Sweet would give the class. Over the weeks and months that followed, Sweet never produced a grammar text or taught a traditional lesson. He did, however, quiz the students on the funnies page, to make sure they “at least picked up the newspaper,” and required them to memorize ten esoteric vocabulary words every Monday, upon which he tested them on Friday. Forty years later, many of the students would still be able to recall the words:
banal, xenophobic, hirsute
.

Every so often, Sweet announced a class-wide, collaborative project. One time, he told the students they would be creating their own magazine and could choose any subject they wanted. As a joke, one of the boys suggested it be all about carp, the ugly, tasteless fish that always seemed to bite first in the local waterways. When Sweet embraced the idea, the kids thought this hilarious and fantastic—a whole magazine about carp!—and spent long hours working on it. A month later
Carpmaster Magazine
was published, complete with tongue-in-cheek reviews, letters to the editor, cartoons, how-to's, fake ads, essays (including “The Carp, America's Noblest Gamefish”), and recipes. (For example, “Carp Stew” called for “3 freezer-burned carp, 1 lb. of spoiled cheese, 2 strips of bacon, and 2 lbs. of spoiled hamburger.”)

Even mundane tasks became exercises in creativity. Sweet required students to add a third line in the upper left-hand corner of their assignments, below their name and class, listing their future profession. Thus papers would read:

In Shartzer's opinion, though, hands-down the best part of Sweet's class was his reading policy, or lack thereof. Rather than a set list, freshmen and sophomores were often allowed to read whatever they wanted, a freedom that blew their minds. Instead of the
Odyssey
, they could choose to read about rebuilding a motor in
Popular Mechanics
. The only requirement was that they finish the story and understand it, then write a properly prepared report.

When Sweet did assign class-wide books, they were often ones the students had never heard of, like Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World
, which was considered radical at the time in a town like Macon. Sweet had a way of explaining the novels that made sense, though. When the class read
Lord of the Flies
, he took all the students out behind Macon High to a creek and had them reenact parts of the book, forcing them to choose sides and role-play When they read a classic such as
Macbeth
, he asked them to read it again if he felt they didn't understand it the first time. When they did, the students were surprised to find that they enjoyed it more the second time. As Sweet explained, “The more you give to a great piece of literature, the more it gives back.”

Most of the students had never experienced a teacher like Sweet. Some had grown up on farms that lacked hot water. Others had gone the first fifteen years of their lives without reading anything much longer than a comic book. Yet as a freshman named David Wells later put it, with Sweet, “I was learning without even realizing it.”

In Shartzer's case, it was in spite of his best efforts. Steve was one of those boys who'd avoided books the best he could, preferring to spend his time playing sports. He was bright enough, but had often put that intellect to use finding ways to avoid doing work, whether it was charming a teacher or enlisting his older sister Pat's help on a book report. Yet even Shartzer didn't mind Sweet's class. By the end of the semester, the strange-looking man in the corduroy jacket had become his favorite teacher. He was by no means alone. Had you polled the Macon High population, there's a good chance a majority of the students would have agreed.

The local parents, however, were not as enamored. Not only did they find Sweet's curriculum unusual and the lack of grammar troubling, but he kept sending their kids home with strange, seemingly dangerous books. Not just
Brave New World
and
Heart of Darkness
but
Lord Jim
and, worst of all, “that play,”
Inherit the Wind
, which struck many in the deeply religious town as blasphemous.

Had Sweet's teaching methods been the extent of his transgressions, the parents might have let it slide. They were not.

The whispers had started within weeks of Sweet's arrival in Macon in January of 1966. They began in the halls of the high school and spread through the town like so much pollen drifting in the wind, from the taverns to the Methodist Church off Route 51 to the fake-wood table-tops in dozens of kitchens. Did you hear about that new teacher? Did you hear what he has those kids reading? Did you see that new Mustang he's driving? Did you know he's not going to church,
any
church? Did you see that girl he had with him last week, the one from Champaign?

Even if Sweet had wanted to stay under the radar in Macon it would have been impossible. New hires at the high school were announced on the front page of the
Macon News
, accompanied by a home address. If he forgot to pay his taxes it was a matter of public record, his name included in the
News'
annual Delinquent Personal Property Tax List, which listed all sums, ranging from the paltry ($1.93 for one Ms. Elsie Damery in 1965) to the truly scandalous (a town-high $171.95 for Mr. J. T. Hogan).

Other information could be ferreted out without much trouble. With limited telephone service, houses in Macon had what were known as party lines where scores of farmhouses might share one telephone line. To distinguish between each, different rings were used. Thus a
riiiiing-riiiiing
might signal that someone was calling for you while a
ring-ring
meant it was for your neighbor. This was all well and good, except that anyone on the loop could, if they were adept, pick up the phone and listen in to anyone else's conversation. Some women in Macon, it was said, spent a good amount of time doing this. They were the same ones who could be seen huddled together at tables or in the vinyl booths at the local diner the next day.

These whisperers held an unusual amount of power in a town as small as Macon. Technically, there was an official town government, but the city council met only once a month, for an hour and a half or so, in a small building under the water tower. None of the councilmen were professional politicians, to say the least. The mayor at the time was a good-natured man with white hair named Wayne Jones; his day job was as the janitor at Macon High.

More problematic for Sweet, most everyone in town cared what went on at the high school. Because Macon was so small and had an unusual number of large families—the Jesses numbered fifteen, the Tomlinsons fourteen—just about every adult in town could claim children, nieces, nephews, or grandchildren who attended Macon High. And thus most everybody had a stake in what went on there. If the town's power structure was loose, the school's was the opposite. The principal answered to the superintendent, who in turn answered to the school board, which consisted of seven elected men—and they were always men—who were usually parents or important local citizens.

Men like these had usually come of age during World War II, then settled down to raise large, God-fearing families. To them, teachers were expected to instill discipline and emphasize that there was a right way and a wrong way to do things in life. The sooner you learned to do the former, the sooner you'd have your own large, God-fearing family.

Sweet, it became apparent to the board and many others in town, wasn't much interested in any of that. What they needed was someone to keep him in line, because Britton didn't seem inclined to do so. When Britton was elevated to superintendent, hope arrived in the form of a new principal by the name of Bill McClard.

When he moved to Macon at the age of thirty-two, Bill McClard was, without a doubt, a man on the rise. Armed with a bachelor's from Illinois State and a master's from Eastern Illinois University, he'd worked at two high schools, first as a teacher and then as principal. The son of a Navy man, McClard was short and thick, with a boxer's nose and a soft chin. A heavy smoker, he'd developed a bit of a paunch in his thirties and, due to a bad back, tended to hunch forward as he walked, giving the impression that he was carrying a heavy load that he was in a great hurry to deliver. A reserved, proud man, he'd been deeply influenced by his time in the Army.

As a result, McClard saw school as an extension of the military, a hierarchical system in which teachers were the lieutenants and students were the foot soldiers. Like many teachers at Macon High, he kept a wooden, cobblestone-sized paddle on his wall. These paddles were treasured items. Some teachers named them (“Board of Education” was popular) while others whittled holes in the wood, the better to approach maximum smacking velocity before making contact with a young man's backside. When students got into trouble, especially male ones, McClard sent them to the gym. To a call of “Line up the miscreants!” the boys turned and bent over so that a cadre of teachers could take turns doling out blows. Sometimes the teachers wound up and halted just short of making contact, just to see the boys jump.