Pam Snitko

 

Bill Teunis was the first teacher I'd ever seen with a beard. It was the fall of 1965, and teachers with beards would soon become commonplace, but we didn't know that then. So when we walked into our sophomore English class at John F. Kennedy High School that September, we were startled by his appearance.

It wasn't just the beard. Most of our male teachers wore crew cuts, white dress shirts with skinny dark ties, black slacks, and polished black shoes, like FBI agents. In his tweed jacket worn over a denim work shirt -- no tie -- corduroy pants and brushed-leather desert boots, glowering at us over that bushy red beard, Mr. Teunis looked exotic and scary.

He may have dressed like an Ivy League student -- in fact, he had recently graduated from Harvard -- but he never tried to come on to us as a pal. If anything, he was stricter and more demanding than the guys in the skinny ties. He was a tough grader. If you spelled "its" with an apostrophe, you automatically got an F. He tore my writing apart, splashing red ink around like a serial killer. He scolded me for being "coy," always holding up his beloved Hemingway as a model. "Don't be coy! Say what you mean! Fewer words!"

Mr. Teunis introduced me to Shakespeare. He loved to dress up in Elizabethan garb and ham it up. His favorite speech was from Richard III:
"Oh lord, methought what pain it was to drown:
What dreadful noise of water in mine ears!
What sights of ugly death within mine eyes!"

After I graduated, we began corresponding. In the spring of my sophomore year, I got a part in a play in Cambridge. I invited Mr. Teunis -- I was never able to call him "Bill" -- to come up  and see me, and he accepted with pleasure. It must have been a few weeks after that letter came that I got a phone call from a high school friend.

"Have you heard about Mr. Teunis?" she said.

"No, what?"

"He drowned."

He and some of his students were swimming in the Shenandoah River, and one of the kids was swept into some rapids. Mr. Teunis dived in to save her. She made it back to shore. He never came up.

Someone once said that a writer should write for one person. I write for Bill Teunis. Last week, my friend and fellow educator Pam Snitko died suddenly. She taught music to hundreds, perhaps thousands of students in this area. She used to say, "It's time to stop reading notes and start making music!" I have only one message for her students: Make music for Pam Snitko.