Mr. Mulford had a scary face. It was covered with scars, I think from a burn accident, and his lips seemed fearsomely fleshy to my 9-year-old eyes. But my fright quickly gave way to fascination on that opening day of school when I entered fourth grade. It was 1967, and Mr. Mulford had been one of the early volunteers in the Peace Corps -- serving in Africa, no less.
Most teachers seemed to spend the first day of class laying down rules I already knew and crushing my hopes for intellectual excitement under brusque warnings about how much "material" we had to cover in how little time. Not Mr. Mulford. He sat on the edge of his desk and, in his deep, mellifluous voice, told us wondrous, exotic tales of the wise and friendly people he had met in that faraway place. I still remember the sun-drenched landscape and brightly colored clothing in the slides he showed us of the village where he'd worked. This was a revelation for a kid growing up in an upper-middle-class California suburb, a kid whose only image of Africans till then was the bloody one burned in my mind's eye by a relentlessly repeated CBS News commercial showing black people savagely beating one another during a never-explained "crisis in the Congo."
In a bureaucratic school system that routinely meted out standard punishments regardless of the reason for the deed, Mr. Mulford was one of those rare teachers who saw through what kids did to the motivations behind their actions. When the principal announced over the loudspeaker that all misbehaving students would henceforth automatically be sent to "Room 22," my compulsive curiosity drove me to think up a way to get myself punished so I could find out what was in that mysterious chamber (kids who'd survived Room 22 spoke about it in hushed, fearful tones). I tore a sheet of binder paper into a handful of tiny pieces, threw them in the air and shouted, "Happy New Year!"
Much to my disappointment, Room 22 turned out to be just a storage room outfitted with a half-dozen desks isolated by partitions, where restless brats and bullies were made to sit silently and write apologetic sentences hundreds of times. The room's deadly secret, I discovered, was nothing but excruciating boredom. But just as I felt I was about to go insane, Mr. Mulford appeared and rescued me from completing the sentences.
One creative assignment Mr. Mulford gave his students was to write a letter to the person they thought they would be in 20 years. He promised to hold onto them and send them to us two decades later. Yeah, sure ... but one day when I was 30, I was amazed to find in my mail a letter addressed to me in my own childish scrawl. I chuckled as I read its confident predictions that, by now, I would have served in the Coast Guard (as my dad had done), graduated from Harvard and be running for senator -- maybe even president!
Well, I did manage to go to Princeton. And -- far better than learning to polish brass and steal elections -- I've remembered, ever since Mr. Mulford's class, to look at my fellow humans in a more respectful and compassionate way than any broadcaster's propaganda or bureaucrat's policy manual would have me do.
-- Steve Rasmussen