In the fall of 1962, Marion Cote, the German teacher at Penns Grove Regional High School, began making her way across the street to Paul W. Carleton elementary school, where I was in the sixth grade, to offer our class an hour a week enrichment course in the German language. Although I did not know it then, those weekly sessions triggered a lifelong love affair with world languages, travel and culture, and change the course of my life. Even long after her retirement, indeed when I was in middle age, Mrs. Cote would still be teaching me important things about life.
Mrs. Cote, whom we affectionately called 'The Frau," was a very practical person. One day she called me up and said something like, "Kipp, when the time comes, and it can't be that far off, my nieces and nephews aren't going to have any idea what to do with all my German books. Would you like them?" She offered me practically her entire library of German related materials going back to the 1930's! I drove down to Penns Grove and picked them up. It took two trips to gather up all her books.
She taught me a lot about old age, as well. Once when I was down there, someone had left a dining room chair in her living room. She asked me if I would put it back at the dining room table, because it would take her forever and she would need to take a nap afterward. I could have lifted the chair with one finger, and she could have, too, ten or so years earlier. She had always been healthy and robust. She drove, just around Penns Grove, well into her eighties. She said the hardest thing about driving was opening and closing the car door. When I left her house that day, I paid attention for the first time in my life when I opened the car door. They are indeed very heavy!
When her health continued to fail, her family finally talked her into getting rid of her house and moving closer to them. For a while, she was still healthy and enjoyed going places with them like the theater and museums.
I guess we last spoke on the phone about three months before she died. She had told me to let it ring and ring, because it took her a long time to get to the phone. We discussed the theater, current events, all sorts of things, really. Her mind was razor sharp, and she wasn't interested in small talk! We talked about my driving up to visit her, but she told me that I could only stay an hour. She got too tired to entertain guests after about an hour.
One of my students came back to visit me during Thanksgiving recess and told me that he was the only one in his class who could rattle off the dative prepositions in German and that his professor was so impressed. That's because Mrs. Cote had made us memorize them (since then memorization has fallen out of favor) and I taught them to my students in the same sing songy way that Mrs. Cote made us memorize them. I was able to tell Mrs. Cote this story, that her teaching methods were still reverberating some thirty years after she retired, still impressing young college professors. She was thrilled, of course!
A while later, I called her and let the phone ring and ring and ring. Nobody answered. I just assumed she was out with her family. Soon after that, my friend, Debi English, sent me her obituary. I hadn't seen it. She asked that donations be made to the Penns Grove Library. For several years I attended a fundraising dinner for the library chaired by another close friend, Sandy Sikoutris Sparks. I spent a small fortune that evening every year. :)
I benefited much from the library, but I benefited much more from Mrs. Cote. She inspired me to study language, to travel and to get to know the big, wide wonderful world around me. It's thanks to her that I've traveled all over half the world and that I have friends from those trips all over this country and just about every other country on earth that comes immediately to mind. Teachers really do "touch the future" and change lives.
A photo taken in the fall of 1967 after our group got back from Germany.
Up until about the eighth grade, most boys wore their hair the same way our fathers had worn theirs in the Forties, combed back with a pomade, often Brylcreem, in a pompadour. Beginning at about that time, many of us adopted the new "conservative look" We started wearing our hair combed down over the forehead. My memory may be faulty, but I remember that Jerry Blavat, a popular DJ and TV personality, had a great influence on how young men in the early to mid-Sixties looked and dressed in the Delaware Valley. The hippie movement was still a few years down the road. One day the guys walked into Mrs. Cote's German class, and she was ready to preach. She said something like, "You boys! Why do you cover up your foreheads like that!? The forehead is such an attractive and important part of the face! I would love to see your foreheads again just once. Why don't you comb your hair back tomorrow, so I can see what your entire faces look like again?" Mrs. Cote was sixtyish and had worn her hair pulled back and tied in a bun ever since anybody could remember. We told her that we'd comb our hair back up over our foreheads the next day, if she would promise to let hers down! She just smiled and got to the lesson. The next day we got to class early for a change. We had not combed our hair in a pompadour but made a feeble attempt to do so on the spot, so that when Mrs. Cote came into the classroom, she'd have to keep her part of the bargain. She saw right through us, that we had all forgotten, was relieved, and the subject never came up again.
My friends and I killing time before 8th grade graduation. We are all wearing pompadours.
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