50 Years Later, I Still Speak To My Teacher Almost Every Day

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue with our American Stories. And now it’s time for “The McLellan Files,” when we go deep inside the life of one of our regular contributors, Bob McClellan. Someone you don’t know, but whose life and whose voice you’re sure to be captivated by. Today, Bob shares with us his letter to his mentor, Bill Walker.

00:00:33
Speaker 2: Dear Bill, I can already see that telling a story about you is going to be very difficult. Not because I’m short on material, but my emotions keep pulling me away from our teacher-and-student relationship to something much deeper and more complex, something much harder to express. I’m reticent to talk about your thoughts or feelings, and very reluctant to try and explain them to someone else, let alone pretend to understand in your heart. I know my own runs in all directions when I think about you, as no one has impacted my life as much as you have. And probably many people out there who will enjoy the academic aspects of our relationship and the enlightenment you brought me. But it’s just at the surface. When we met, I was imprisoned and lonely. I was an unhappy corporal at twenty-one years of age. I had no idea of where to go in my life, or that it was even capable of going anywhere. It was just all too chaotic. This is the poem I wrote at twenty-one years of age and at the outset of my college career, asking for help. The answer and the messenger, however, that arrived, was not what I expected. The poem is called “The Maze.” How appropriate! I sit amid a maze, walled in by my desires. Sitting here with me is this love I have? Someday, if I ever get out, I’d like to show it to you. I don’t know how I got here, for it’s certainly no place to be. Though you’re just on the other side of the walls, you are still many miles from me. So if you love me a little and are tired of waiting about, you might find your way in and help me to get out. And then you appeared, disguised as an English professor. Well, we’re fifty years down the road in our friendship, Bill. We still speak almost every day. Even today, as I write my stories, I look to you for advice and comments. I may never be able to explain the why or the how of our friendship, and if I did, I doubt that, other than you, there was no one I could explain it to. I wasn’t looking for a father; I had already left one behind, and I hardly fit the role of a loving son, which leads me without an answer or explanation. Maybe our friendship is just best shared between you and me. I was sitting in the back of the class one day in May of 1970 when Mr. Walker walked in and advanced to the podium. In his arms were some books and notepads and copies of a syllabus for the English 1 course that he would teach. He wore a French beret, plaid shirt, tweed jacket, blue jeans,

00:03:21
Speaker 3: and cowboy boots.

00:03:23
Speaker 2: Well, not quite the dress I expected from a college professor, but since I hadn’t been to college before, I guess I had no idea of how professors dressed.

00:03:32
Speaker 3: He was twenty years older

00:03:34
Speaker 2: than I, came from a wealthy Connecticut family, and had an incredible education and experience—an immersion in the world of literature and books.

00:03:44
Speaker 3: As he called the names of the students,

00:03:46
Speaker 2: he paused when he reached mine, purposely mispronounced and moved on down the page before I could respond. I thought to myself, sitting there, “Gee, he must really be pissed off about the comment I made to him after his speech class last night.” On the day I was assigned to deliver my speech in his class, he decided to let the students rap about the war in Vietnam for the next two weeks. I sat there, ready to go, but everybody wanted to discuss their feelings about the war.

00:04:17
Speaker 3: Being just released

00:04:18
Speaker 2: from active duty in the Marines, I didn’t want to talk about the war. I didn’t care about Vietnam anymore. It was done. Who’s out. I was a civilian. I wanted an education. I answered up when he called on me in that class, “You should all run down in the list if you’re all so interested in the war.”

00:04:28
Speaker 3: Finally, I just ran out of patience, and I cornered him in the doorway to tell him what I thought of him and his class.

00:04:29
Speaker 2: Leaning down under that French beret and putting my face right up to that full beard of his, I said, “You know, Mr. Walker, I don’t like this class of yours. It doesn’t have any structure to it.” Now, sitting here waiting for this class to begin, I thought to myself, “This is going to be a tough semester.”

00:04:47
Speaker 3: A few weeks later, Nixon invaded Cambodia, and four students were shot dead on the Kent State campus.

00:04:48
Speaker 2: Colleges erupted all over the country, and some closed, with riots breaking out. After two nights of outrunning tactical police, throwing rocks against their great shields of armor, and hearing the metallic clunk, hiss, and hiss of gas canisters enveloping me in a caustic fog, I went home for the night. I returned to my apartment at midnight. As I climbed into bed, I saw my English textbook. I had not opened it in three weeks. Opening it up to the assigned story was the title of “The Celestial Omnibus” by E. M. Forster. By 3:30 a.m., I had read it three times. The next morning I was seated in the first row when Mr. Walker walked in, surprised to see me sitting in someone else’s seat. But he said nothing about it, neither did its prior occupant.

00:06:06
Speaker 3: Throughout his lecture, my arms ceaselessly kept being raised until the hour ended.

00:06:07
Speaker 2: I was on him immediately, asking questions and trying to understand more about this strange story that had such a great effect on me.

00:06:21
Speaker 3: He tried to ignore me, and when we reached his

00:06:23
Speaker 2: office, he took a number of large books off the shelf and abruptly told me, “If you liked that story, then you should read these. I’m very busy right now,” and he abruptly closed the door. Summer came early that year because all the campuses were closed due to demonstrations. Working nights as a bartender gave me ample time to read each and every

00:06:43
Speaker 3: volume he pushed into my arms.

00:06:45
Speaker 2: When I completed them, I searched for his address, and I walked to Woodland Avenue in Palo Alto to return them to him.

00:06:53
Speaker 3: His house was more like a bungalow cottage.

00:06:56
Speaker 2: The front of it had a brick path of flowers running along the edges. The cottage was shaded by leafy trees and bushes in front of the windows and closing it from sight to make it more private. When he answered the door, he was surprised to see me. I offered the books and said I read them and wanted to return them.

00:07:15
Speaker 3: But the school was closed.

00:07:16
Speaker 2: Then I extended my arms towards him and put the books between his hands. It was an awkward moment, and then he invited me into his house. Crossing over that threshold, I stepped into his living room and was astonished by what I saw. All the walls were covered in bookshelves, paintings, and inscriptions of all kinds. I could see a trail of shelves meandering down the hall into his bedroom in the back. They were everywhere, from floor to ceiling. The only sound was a record playing some classical music. A couple open books sat on the arm of his couch.

00:07:56
Speaker 3: On the wall, there was a sign that had an inscription that read, “Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives.” End of quote.

00:07:57
Speaker 2: I asked him, “Who said that?” He told me it was from Thoreau. I didn’t know who he was, but I thought I just should try that advice.

00:08:12
Speaker 3: Sometime,

00:08:13
Speaker 2: I went over and I read the names—the titles—of the many books that covered the walls. I had to ask him, “Did you really read all of these?” I felt as if I was standing inside his mind, that to understand who he is, one would have to read all these books.

00:08:34
Speaker 1: And when we come back, we’ll continue with “The McClelland Files.” And by the way, if you have a friend or a neighbor who’s a great storyteller, send them our way. Send them to ouramericannetwork.org. I bumped into Bob on a visit into the San Francisco area. A friend of mine had told me to sit down with him, and about four hours later, I was just mesmerized by his life experience and his writing talent. And he does something completely different for a living, having to do with financial services, but my goodness, what a storyteller!

00:09:06
Speaker 3: And what a writer!

00:09:07
Speaker 1: And by the way, if you have stories about important mentor relationships, a teacher that encouraged you in your life, who changed your life—again, send those stories to ouramericannetwork.org. That’s ouramericannetwork.org. We love hearing from ordinary Americans. We’re terrific writers as a country, and we have terrific stories to tell. When we come back, we continue with Bob McClelland and his talk and his letter to Bill Walker.

00:09:37
Speaker 3: More after these.

00:09:38
Speaker 1: messages. And we’re back with our American Stories and Bob McClelland’s tribute to his English teacher and mentor, Bill Walker. When he left off, Bob had just crossed into uncharted territory: his teacher’s home.

00:10:24
Speaker 2: We talked a little, and he remarked that since I had such an attraction to literature, he would loan me some more books. I read them, returned them, and received more when I did. In the afternoons, I would come over to his house, and he would discuss with me the substance within those books. It was like my own classroom. During long evenings over drinks, he shared his thoughts and encounters with the many writers he had met, and how each writer enlarged his view of the world

00:10:53
Speaker 3: and his appreciation of it.

00:10:55
Speaker 2: From drinking with Faulkner to dinner with de Beauvoir, parties with Tennessee Williams, and Truman Capote was the world that he visited. These visits with him at his house continued daily through the summer as he fed my imagination about the world of literature and art. When he asked me about what my plans were, I skipped over the enormous hole in my education and background and told him I wanted to be a lawyer and go either to Harvard or Berkeley. I’m sure he was amused. But if he knew I didn’t know

00:11:25
Speaker 3: the difference between a verb and an adverb,

00:11:26
Speaker 2: that I only had a 1.5 GPA in high school and my test for admission revealed that I needed to spend one year in remedial high school classes before even taking college-level courses, he would have either laughed himself to death or kicked me out of his house, but he didn’t. Mr. Walker really was a stickler for details. There were times when I would mispronounce a word or make some egregiously stupid remark, and he would glance at me over his glasses with his perturbed look

00:12:02
Speaker 3: on his face.

00:12:03
Speaker 2: I thought, “Gee, any minute, he’s going to rap me across the knuckles with the ruler and make me write the correct answer on the blackboard one hundred times.” But he made his point, and I became more prepared in the future when I came over to see him. I became an avid fan and user of the dictionary after that, and I still am. The limitations of the classroom quickly became apparent to me. From the start, when reading Homer for the first time, three lectures in a week for fifteen minutes doesn’t quite get into my mind deep enough. Reading fifteen thousand six hundred lines of “The Iliad” just to find out who won the Trojan War makes for a long and arduous quarter. How could I learn anything from a twenty-nine-hundred-year-old epic when I didn’t even know what an epic was? From Mr. Walker, I received lectures at night on epic poems—their structure and themes, and who wrote them—after which he’d suggested to start again with “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.” I was grateful that he allowed me to read it in English rather than classical Greek. I needed another drink after that, and he made one for the both of us. It seems he found me as tiring and arduous as I did the epic. What did I take away from these lectures on the epic? Over cocktails late in the evenings at his house? While, during an English class at Berkeley, the students were asked, “Who has read an epic poem before?” Out of twenty-five students, only five of us had. When asked if anyone had read more than one, my hand was the only one that went up. My professor asked me, “How many have you read?” And I answered, “Four?” Still, I only got a C in the class. It was becoming clear to me that no matter how passionate I was, I lacked the educational background, temperament, and preparation to be an academic or a lawyer. There were too many holes in my secondary education that I neglected to fill, and now it was too late. Just reading the books would be my consolation. But since there are no absolutes in literature, I found a place for me. Words defy precision and exactitude. Definitions of words can be multiple, ambiguous, and malleable, leaving them open to different interpretation and understanding. Words in a sentence can blend together like colors on a canvas. There is no model to measure, meaning you can’t quantify your emotions. The answers don’t lie at the bottom of the column. They reside inside the laboratory of your imagination and experience. The ambiguity of words, nuances, and definitions require a different approach to thinking. One needs to look at a passage from different angles and determine its meaning from the

00:14:52
Speaker 3: support of the text.

00:14:54
Speaker 2: The multiple definitions of the words and the reaction of the reader are very important. I needed more evidence of those beliefs about language. All I have to do is reach Shakespeare. I was in class in the morning and reading in the early afternoons. All of it was only preparation for the classroom in the living room of Mr. Walker’s house at night. Soon I would be there almost every night. All the open books and records of poetry spread out across this floor were evidence of what we discussed. The empty glasses, ice trays, and bottles gave a clue of how long we talked. This was where my education and our friendship began. Bill was not a cloistered academic. He’d served in the Army as an enlisted man in Japan at the end of the war. He worked as a purser for Grace Lines. He flew from TWA to Europe, and he was a desk clerk at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego.

00:15:50
Speaker 3: He also was a truck driver in San Diego.

00:15:53
Speaker 2: And yet he received both a scholarship to do a Ph.D. on Conrad at Stanford and later received a writing fellowship from Stanford. One issue of Esquire magazine listed him as one of the top fifty up-and-coming writers.

00:16:08
Speaker 3: He is one of the few

00:16:09
Speaker 2: who are blessed or cursed to have art torque and jerk him into a world that resides in the realm of imagination and creativity. And so, consequently, it’s not easy to find other people affected so deeply. The desire to write and live in the world of art can be a lonely experience. There is risk and danger in that if it becomes your life work. Art’s not a hobby; it requires sacrifices, and sometimes that sacrifice is companionship. And every so often Bill would say the price he paid was he loved his books, but they can’t put their arms around and love back.

00:16:30
Speaker 3: He was brilliant, but alone.

00:16:31
Speaker 2: This was his Faustian bargain. He told me many years later, after he retired, he wondered if he did anything important, did he do anything that made a difference in someone’s life. He looked at me and said, “I’ve asked myself many times, ‘Did my efforts make any difference to anyone?'”

00:17:08
Speaker 3: And then I

00:17:08
Speaker 2: thought of you, Bardsley. I still have my friendship with Mr. Walker. Our conversations are not as loud or lengthy since we quit drinking, but every once in a while we disagree and joust about literature. When he addresses me as Robert, I know he is once again reminding me who’s the student. As I continue to write these stories for “Our American Stories,” our conversations together have increased to almost every day. Is it just a coincidence that I ended up being a storyteller at ninety? He continues to astonish me about how much he reads, and more importantly, how much he loves literature. Mr. Walker was the messenger who sparked that same passion in me. I’m sure that many of you were asking, “Who really is Mr. Walker?” I discovered the answer to that question a year after I met him. Tacked to a wall in Mr. Walker’s apartment was a copy of a drawing by Gustave Doré. I bought it for him forty-eight years ago after seeing it hanging on a wall of a poster shop in North Beach. I could immediately see that this portrait truly captured the essence of Mr. Walker’s personality and mania that are manifestations of his passion for books and life. It is a picture of Don Quixote seated alone in his library, with his right arm raising his sword above as he reads from the book in his left hand. All around him are the many monsters and damsels that he encounters on his sally into the world of complete madness, fantasy, and imagination. As a medieval knight driven to delusion after reading so many stories about love, romance, and chivalry, Don Quixote lives, interprets, and transforms the world around him from reality to fiction. His story is about the power a man possessed by stories and imagination can make himself,

00:19:04
Speaker 3: and the world, and anything he wants.

00:19:08
Speaker 1: The End. And my goodness, what a beautiful piece of writing, and what a celebration of a lifelong mentor and friend. Bill Walker’s story, Bob McClelland’s story, here on “Our American Stories.”