Erudite teacher will be missed

Latin was already a dead language when I learned it at Dixon High School in 1961, and now so is Christine Bessmer, my beloved Latin teacher. Or is she dead? Certainly her influence will live on in minds she molded with her morning mantras. Is she living somewhere right now, and will she really live again in some transformed society of which I also expect to be a part? I think so.

Chris Bessmer would have been a terrible ambassador to Italy. I say that because she was such a superb teacher. Ambassador Vernon Walters, the multimouthed U.S. diplomat, confessed it was his duty to practice sustained ambiguity with his counterparts.

Chris was never ambiguous. In the classroom, she labored for precision, clarity and understanding – the very elements necessary for the peaceful world Walters said he wanted. I have no question Walters, warped in 15 to 50 languages, would have flunked our Latin class.

I didn’t flunk, which is one reason I loathe Walters and his slippery stripe. Passing Chris’ class with A’s remains one of my most pleasant high school memories, though a 34 on a pop quiz one day put the fear of God into me and took the fear of Roman numerals out of me.

I was terribly frightened about taking her class because Latin struck me as a field far too foreign from the farmer’s 40 acres where I frequently baled Illinois hay on hot summer days for pocket change. But CB, as I called her in later years, with her pedagogical precision, overcame my fear of the Latin lip.

CB, ostensibly a spinster, and I stayed in touch for 40 years after high school. She sent me Valentine’s Day cards, letters, jokes and “quotable quotes” she wrote on her blackboard every day, sometimes writing with both hands at the same time in opposite directions. P.T. Barnum would have paid her more than DHS for that feat alone.

Secure in her own scholarship, she boasted to me one day after I had achieved a few advanced degrees, “I is more eruditer than you am,” a beautiful quip with which I once whipped up a lather on a university provost who had irked me.

A decade before CB died, I took my wife and young boys to Atlanta to meet her. Walt Disney’s “Aladdin” had just come out. When we left, one of them said something to me about having just met my Aladdin teacher. He was wiser than he knew.

Actually, she was better than Aladdin. Aladdin was fiction; CB was – and is – fact. She passed my own classification as an A+ pedagogue, pen pal and person. Amo te, teacher, till we meet again.

Note to readers – James Lutzweiler graduated from Dixon High School in 1964 and is the archivist at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C. Chris Bessmer died Jan. 13 in Conyers, Ga.; she was 91.