MUSING ABOUT: The Road to Destiny and the Circles of Life

by Lesley Misko

Boyertown High’s class of ’75 isn’t the only one who recently celebrated a significant life event.

I did too. The class of '75 and I share  a 50th birthday. 

As BASH ‘75 moved closer to graduating from  the high school and embarking on the next phase of their journey, I arrived at BASH to teach English and thereby embarked on the next phase of my own journey.

I wasn’t the only one. In the spring of '74, Jane Stahl and I met while sitting in the lobby of the Education Center building, waiting to be interviewed for teaching jobs. We introduced ourselves and chatted awkwardly, as one does with strangers.

Our circumstances were different. Jane was returning to her home, the place where she grew up until she and her husband headed out for a new life in Colorado. After six years, family ties were bringing them back to Boyertown. For me, Boyertown was going to be a brand new experience, extremely different from my urban background. I was here because of a relationship and only anticipated a one-year stay. Jane was hired for an opening at Junior High West, and I was hired for the high school opening. We went our separate ways until we reunited years later when Jane transferred to the senior high.

During that 1974-75 school year, I often felt like Alice in Wonderland, an alien who had fallen down a rabbit hole where things were mixed up and confusing. 

Since it was the Boyertown Area School District, I referred to all students as living in Boyertown. But the students corrected me. “Bally is Bally, and Pine Forge is Pine Forge, and Earl is Earl and none of those are Boyertown,” they repeatedly explained. 

In addition to geography confusion and not understanding town pride, It seemed as if everyone here was named Moyer… or maybe Boyer or Schmoyer. I had the “M” homeroom, and it took me forever to learn the first names associated with the two rows of Moyers. The Bally kids attempted to reassure me that not everyone was a Moyer. They pointed out that in Bally, many people were named Eddinger.

When I saw a girl wearing a pretty beaded bracelet or nice boots or carrying a nice purse and complimented her and asked where she purchased it, the answer was always the same: “the sale.” Finally, one day I blurted out, “Is there a sale in this town every day?” The kids laughed and explained that “the sale” was synonymous with Zerns, the local huge “farmers’ market” that sold everything from produce and baked goods to vacuum cleaners and refinished furniture. There was a guy wearing glasses that looked like a woman's legs. It was a unique shopping experience for sure!

Teaching English at the high school was a confusing experience too. There were 66 different nine-week courses available to students. Students from all three grade levels could be in the same class. Class themes included things like Science Fiction I, II, III and Shakespeare 1 and 2. I had to prepare to teach four different courses daily. It was wild; I often was only a handful of pages ahead of the students and I got very little sleep.

My teaching peers were also "different." Men sat on one side of the faculty room: women, on the other. There was an accordion  door that could be closed to separate the two. It definitely seemed like a multi-decade throwback. One day a male social studies teacher decided to lecture me in the faculty room because I was wearing a denim jumper. He didn’t seem to know it was a respectable and popular fashion trend at the time, and he was definitely being rude about it.

Another teacher verbally attacked me in the parking lot at the end of a school day. She accused me of deliberately allowing the students on the newspaper staff to print a nasty comment about the wrestling team. The comment was not nasty, and I couldn’t figure out why this woman cared about the wrestling team. It took me a week to figure out the team’s coach was her husband. There were quite a few teaching couples in the building, and it took me time to figure out who belonged with whom. I never imagined that one day, I would be part of one of those couples too.

In addition to teaching English, I was hired to advise the school newspaper. I quickly discovered there was no newspaper staff; the kids had quit to protest the firing of the previous adviser. Another English teacher, Peg Huffert, one of the few people who went out of her way to be friendly, advised the school yearbook, and she found me a student to get me started. The student was Rowan Carter. 

Since I was working with Rowan on the newspaper and did not have him as a student in class, our relationship allowed for more candor, and I felt able to ask him about some of the things that bewildered me— like the lack of diversity. As the year progressed, I was thankful for his honest and gracious insights.

To me, someone who grew up in an urban area filled with varied people of all types, one of the most odd aspects of the school was the lack of racial, ethnic, religious differences. There were more people of color on my own high school’s basketball team than there were in this 1,500-student high school. 

There were so many things that seemed strange to me. 

Why did I have kids sitting in class wearing pagers and why were they permitted to get up and leave class when their pagers sounded? How could they get an education if they kept leaving class?

Why were there extremely intelligent students who said they weren't going to college? 

Why did some new high school graduates seek out joining the military even though they didn’t “have to?” 

Why were there girls wearing small white caps on their heads all the time? 

Why would the police stop traffic for a parade down the main street following a winning football game?

In the meantime,  while I continued to learn about this often bewildering community where I worked, the relationship that had brought me here fell apart and I planned to pack my belongings and head out as soon as I could, come June. It was a brutally difficult time for me. I was all alone in a strange place without any source of emotional support. When I wasn't doing school work, I sat around crying.

But as time passed, I learned to love visiting Zerns every Friday after school. It felt warm and friendly to hear the kids I knew from school, calling out "hello"  as I walked past them at the stands where they worked. 

I learned that there was some diversity: the girls with the white caps were Mennonite, and I learned some of their traditions. 

I learned that no matter how brilliant they might be, not all kids could afford college, and I learned to appreciate and respect the things they chose to do instead. 

I learned that the kids who ran out of class with their pagers, were training to be volunteer fire fighters on whom local communities would rely.

I learned that some young people loved their country enough to defend it and its values, even if they didn't "have" to. 

I learned about Halloween parades and parades to let the town know the guys had been victorious in the weekly football contest. 

I learned that college-bound or not, the kids here were good people... sincere and honest, hardworking and caring.  I still remember Dennis Knepp, parttime manager of the State Theater, saying, “Here is your $2.00; no teacher of mine should have to pay to go to my movie."

I learned loads of things, and many of them were very good things.  So at the end of the year, I stayed. The following year, I learned more things and I stayed again… and the “agains” piled up and a few years later, I married the guy teaching next door to me. Our first “date” was attending a BASH prom together because we both had senior homerooms. And a few years still later, we had a son. The Boyertown area community is the home he has known.

So in the blink of an eye 50 years have passed… and I am still here. And I’m still in touch with Rowan, who graciously reached out to me when he learned that my husband had passed away.  And Jane Stahl and I, who met 50 years ago, being interviewed for a teaching job, are working tougher on The Boyertown Area Expression.

Some BASH grads may recall reading Willa Cather’s novel, My Antonia. At the story’s conclusion, protagonist Jim Burden shares a significant realization. He says:

“I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man’s experience is. For Antonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”

Happy birthday, BASH class of '75. Happy 50th birthday.  

- Lesley Misko

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