Mrs. Dorthy Rauth

A few years ago, shortly after I bought my Ford Expedition, my wife needed to go get something out of the car. Rather than giving her my keys, I gave her my “code” to unlock the doors. I rattled it off like it was a phone number. “It’s very easy to remember,” I added. Landi looked at me like I had two heads.

“How am I supposed to remember that?”, she said giving me a look that only a long-suffering wife of thirty years can.

I shared with her my trick to remembering the number. “It’s easy,” I said. “It’s the most important year and month in the run up to the commencement of hostilities in World War One.” I thought I was being helpful.

Apparently, I wasn’t.

Scowling, Landi wrote down the code (against all manner of security best practices), and left to retrieve her important something from the car. I thought for a minute. I knew why I knew that July 1914 was so damned important. A memory came back and I smiled. It’s a memory that always makes me smile.

In 1971, Mrs. Dorthy Rauth taught history at Douglas MacArthur Junior High School in Jonesboro, Arkansas. She was about five feet four inches tall. She always dressed like she was going to a meeting at the bank. When she walked into the room, it was clear that she was chairman of the board at the bank.

In the twentieth century, one of the great injustices of our society was that women of intellect and ambition were, for the most part, limited to becoming teachers or nurses. Other opportunities just didn’t exist. Mrs. Rauth chose teaching. I was blessed to be her student.

History was Mrs. Rauth’s passion. When I was in the eighth grade, she was my home room teacher. Her history class was my first class each morning.

When she taught history, it wasn’t a dry, boring hour to endure. It was the continuation of the adventure story she was telling yesterday. It was like watching Raiders of the Lost Ark. When she told a story, the story came alive. It wasn’t rote memorization of dates and names she was concerned with. She wanted you to understand what happened, when it happened, why it happened and how it happened. Moreover, she wanted you to know why it was important, and what the result was. Class was an hour, but it seemed like it was only a couple of minutes. Each day we’d stop, and I’d wonder what was next. I was frequently guilty of reading ahead or going to the library to find out more. Just so you know, the encyclopedia isn’t quite as accurate, thorough or complete as you would like on many matters of history.

While Mrs. Rauth told the story, she walked the room. She wasn’t working. No, she was making a movie in your head. She was having a great time explaining to a bunch of eighth grade Arkie kids how things played out in some of the great events in history. She brought it alive. She brought history alive. I could have sat in that class all day. You can have algebra. I’ll take history.

I knew that July was the critical month in the run up to August 1914 because Mrs. Rauth had explained it so well fifty-some-odd years before. Europe was a powder keg. Serbs were agitating against Austria-Hungary mostly as a result of Austria-Hungary annexing Bosnia. A Bosnian Serb shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June. July, 1914 was a month of intense, diplomatic maneuvering. It was the last best chance to avoid a war. Toward the end of July, Austria-Hungary gave Serbia an ultimatum no sovereign country could accept. Serbia declined. August 1914, war was on. Alliance treaties pulled in France, Russia, and England. Modern automatic weapons and artillery greeted frontal assaults and cavalry charges. An entire generation of French, German and English boys disappeared in the fog and smoke, the mud and the blood of no-man’s land on Flanders fields.

I remember asking questions in class that day. When she answered them, she spoke to me. It was as if we were having a serious, private conversation about the war. No one else asked questions. I’m not sure anyone else cared. There were twenty-eight other kids in that class, and I suspect no one else gave a crap about why the Serbs were being such a pain in the ass about Bosnia. Mrs. Rauth and I had the most amazing conversation in the middle of an eighth grade history class. I had always loved history, but now I loved Mrs. Rauth because she answered my questions.

1992 was a tumultuous time for both me and the world. The Soviet Union had recently collapsed. The Bosnians and the Serbs were fighting again in Sarajevo. I was divorced and living in New Jersey. I happened to be in Jonesboro one weekend when my parent’s had a pool party. As usual, I felt a little out of place at their party. Despite having a successful career in Information Technology, I was still much more of a cowboy than a country club kind of guy. My parent’s friends, very much country club creatures, were all attired in the latest country club fashions. I was wearing jeans and a sport coat.

I mingled a little bit. I had been gone from Jonesboro for over ten years. Many of the newcomers didn’t know me. Some of Mom and Dad’s old friends remembered me. Some thought I was my brother. That used to happen a lot. We favor each other.

At the far end of the pool, at a table by themselves, I saw Mrs. Rauth and her husband. She and Coach Rauth were chatting with another couple. Coach Rauth, retired, had been a longtime coach at Arkansas State University. I went over to them and waited until the conversation ended. I approached Mrs. Rauth.

Mrs. Rauth didn’t recognize me at first. It had been over twenty years since I had seen her. I could tell that she thought I was my brother, the Goob. I knew how to clear things up.

I lit a cigarette, took a sip of bourbon and commented “Well here we are, seventy-seven years past the Archduke’s assassination, and they are still fighting in Sarajevo.”

Mrs. Rauth smiled. Her eyes lit up. She remembered me. I knew she remembered me.

For the next hour or so, she, Coach Rauth and I had one of the most invigorating conversations I think I have ever had. She was so well-informed and articulate and Coach Rauth was her equal. I had never met him before. I just knew he had been a basketball coach. I could have talked with them until sunrise. It was a wonderful evening.

Both Coach and Mrs. Rauth are long gone now. I never met their son, Wally. If I ever do, I’m buying him a drink. We will toast his mother, and his father.

I know that it was wrong for women to not have the opportunities back then that they have today. I understand it. I would be lying if I didn’t say that my generation certainly did benefit from having a lot of truly great teachers.

They really were the very best and brightest.