I am not a regular user of Facebook, and I still sport the gray silhouette placeholder instead of a real photo. Nevertheless, only two weeks ago I happened to install the Facebook mobile app. Recently my Brownsville High School classmate Anna Neumann, Class of ’71, tagged a few names, including mine, asking a question about the death of James C. Ericson, and from the mobile notification, I learned of his passing. James C. Ericson, known to us as Mr. Ericson, was my high school English teacher for two years, teaching regular English III and English V, his advanced American literature course.  There are many comments online as his former students share  fond memories of our time in his classes.

It’s been about 45 years since I last saw Mr. Ericson, but he’s still  in my head. I look down at my desktop, with lots of scribbled notes, and I see it. Rather often I have some odd thought or memory, and I write a note  as something to google, or research on Wikipedia, or shop for. On one sheet of many, only a few days old, in a list between “buy HDMI extender for kitchen TV” and “Happy Startup School”, I had scrawled “William Faulkner video?” I may have written that on the day Mr. Ericson died.

What does that note to self mean? I had read some reference to William Faulkner, and Mr. Ericson dominates that space in my memory. His readings from Faulkner novels were so engaging, I realized I didn’t know what Faulkner himself sounded like. So I made a note to see if I could find a Faulkner video, maybe of him reading his work, to compare to the master, Mr. Ericson. I can still remember Mr. Ericson’s voice like it was yesterday, reading some of the dramatic parts of Faulkner and Hemingway. In particular, he spent quite a bit of class time reading aloud long passages from The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner, 1929).  I remember especially well his performance of the opening to Part 3: April 6, 1928, by Jason:

Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say. I says you’re lucky if her playing out of school is all that worries you. I says she ought to be down there in that kitchen right now, instead of up there in her room, gobbing paint on her face and waiting for six niggers that cant even stand up out of a chair unless they’ve got a pan full of bread and meat to balance them, to fix breakfast for her.

I can still hear his voice in my head, enunciating that first sentence with the proper Southern accent, spitting out the words. There is such power in the spoken word, all these years later.

Today, someone would be recording the class and there would probably be a huge kerfuffle over reciting (even assigning?) such a book in high school. But Mr. Ericson made it all so … interesting. It really is a testament to his voice, his diction and erudition, as well as his teaching skill. He was never happier around us than when he was sharing his love for great literature, by reading it to us, sharing himself with us.  He just lit up when he got to read aloud a great passage.  He would have been terrific recording audio books of the classics!

Mr. Ericson did have his limits. He assigned several Hemingway short stories, and I sampled some in the collection that were not assigned. When I discovered the racy part of Up in Michigan (Hemingway, 1923), I asked if he could read that story in class? “No,” was his scowling reply.  But he got me to read more Hemingway!

I remember Mr. Ericson as always very firmly in control of his classroom. He would even lend a hand when Mrs. Sample, the milquetoast English teacher next door, lost control of her students. I don’t recall anyone ever challenging Mr. Ericson’s control of the classroom, and that must be a testament to how smoothly he ran things. Mr. Metsinger, our algebra teacher, had control, but that was through some very intense attention to troublemakers. Mr. Ericson was too interesting and fun for students to make trouble, at least as I remember.

From reminiscing with my sister Nancy, two years ahead of me in school, I was reminded of more details about his classes. One of his teaching techniques was to have us write a page or two in the style of the author we were studying – a page of Faulkner, or Hemingway, or Dreiser, or James.  “I credit him with teaching me to write,” Nancy said. “He had this incredibly intricate system for marking up our papers: needs transition, run on sentence, misplaced preposition. He got me interested in editing the student newspaper, and I came in second in a student editing competition. I’ve always loved to edit.” Nancy placed out of Freshman Lit at UT, but many of her friends were failing at the writing assignments. She started editing their papers, because she loved the process she had learned from Mr. Ericson. “I get a real high out of editing,” she said.

Nancy calculated that Mr. Ericson was only 30 years old when she first had him as a teacher. “And there he was smoking his pipe, and I thought he was so old.” Nancy, Martha Cameron, and friends used to stop in at his house during college, just to say hi and keep in touch. She puts him in a class of his own: “He was the only teacher that I feel really prepared me for college, for what college was going to be like:  a lot of writing, and a lot of marking up papers.”

I would think from time to time that I should look him up when I made it back to Brownsville, but I haven’t visited in quite some time. And now it’s too late.

Thank you, Mr. Ericson.  We will remember you forever!