Verbatim: Downyflake

Welcome to Verbatim, a re-telling of anything and everything on Nantucket through your own words. We accept photos, writing, and pretty much anything else that is an expression and celebration of the community we live in and the beauty around us. In this week's submission Robert Barsanti describes the legacy an influential teacher like Ritch Leone leaves on a small town.

Submissions may be sent to ackweb@plumtv.com, or dropped off at our office location in digital format at 4 North Water Street, Nantucket, MA 02554.

Downyflake

The Downyflake, in the early morning, is patronized by silent men. We enter in golf groups, either singly or in foursomes, sit down and drink coffee before we open the paper, look up at the news, or nod at the others. It is a companionable, brotherly silence; we either all know the news or aren’t in much of a hurry to find out.

A friend of mine, now dead, introduced the ritual to me. In my last years of high school, we would leave early morning swim team practice together, drive in his car to the Depot and sit with the DPW men and the plumbing contractors over fried eggs, hash browns and toast. We read the box scores, did the crossword, handed the sports page back and forth and ate comfortably without the pressures of wives, girlfriends, or parents.

Since then, I still enjoy the practice, although not as often as I once did. Work starts too early and I go to sleep far too late to become a regular with my own place at the counter. On Saturdays, I manage to turn up for an hour of coffee drinking and donut eating. Occasionally I get nods from other men who, more likely than not, have been students of mine. They come in with their kids, wave or shake hands, and then corral the crayons and the trucks for the three year old.

For good or ill, that is the legacy you get for being a teacher. You don’t get paid enough to become a philanthropist and name buildings or even benches after yourself and, only rarely, will they name a classroom after you. Most of your work happens with the doors closed. Afterwards, you can’t point out a building or a painting or even an investment account and claim that you made that. The best work you do comes from nudging someone else to do their own best work; you shouldn’t even get the credit. Your best students never come back to town and your worst ones pollute the newspaper. But in a small town like Nantucket, the nod and the handshake are enough. It’s a fleeting legacy of smiles, waves, and kind words.

Noone will get more of these than Ritch Leone. For 35 years, he has helped kids make birdhouses, cutting boards, ceramic houses, murals, sculpture, and lightship baskets. Year after year, the cultural icon of the moment become art in his kiln or on his tables. Somewhere, far back in his closets are ceramic Wu-Tang Clan signs having coffee with album art from The Clash and Reo Speedwagon. Finer and grander art has come from his classroom. Former students have work hanging in the best houses on island, have gallery shows in New York, and are on display in museums. Unfortunately, Leone’s finest work isn’t on display, unless it would be in lost diplomas recovered.

Ritch was the teacher of last resort. The Holden Caulfields and James Deans of the school fell to him. They would leave my class with a bathroom pass and disappear for 30 minutes while they sat in his art room. Sometimes he harangued them. Sometimes they shared the universal adolescent passion play with him. Sometimes they just hung out. Other teachers focused on college applications and standardized tests; Ritch focused on the troubled and the troubling. For the most part, it worked. They sat in his room with the crazy music and the crazy art with the crazy teacher and got back up on the rails of high school.

Great teachers, like Ritch, have a secret that good teachers can only fake. They like the kids. They don’t just like the kids who do their homework, or who try their best on the exam or who sit quietly and write beautifully clear notes. They like the ones with the hair and the acne and the stud through their eyebrow and the bad teeth who write their favorite songs from Deep Purple in ink on their forearms. Students can sense, quickly, the difference between the good and the great teachers. The good may get them ready for college and the workforce, but the great get them ready for life. When the baby is sick at three in the morning, the job is slowly slipping from your grasp, and your husband hasn’t come home yet, you don’t think about the subjunctive tense. You mind turns to Ritch Leone and his hope.

Because he liked the kids so much, he was a soft touch. Mama Leone was a sure addition as a chaperone for the dances and the trips. He ran graduation and the yearbook. He drove the Junior Miss winner in the parade, advised classes, and taught the seniors to dance. He was president of the union, sat on the school council, and piped up to the department heads.

To Ritch, and to teachers like him, school wasn’t a job. It didn’t end at three not did it stop on Friday and resume on Monday. To him, and others, it was a commitment to the kids. All of the schools that I have worked in have people like Ritch; he forms the corps of teachers. The corps is almost always made up of older teachers who have given up on a career but have traded it for making a difference.

One of the many things that make Nantucket schools special, and which give them so much promise, is that the corps of teachers can have a sustained impact on generations. A teacher on Nantucket will teach one young man who will become the father of the next young man and who, may, become the father of the third. His values will pass on to thousands of students who will build homes, raise families, and send their kids to the same teacher. And that same teacher, is a member of the church, works with the caterers in the summer, and coaches at the boy’s club in the fall. Nantucket, at its best, can be an educational hothouse. The corps of teachers, with men like Ritch Leone, tend to that hothouse.

Anyone who teaches will only get the reward and the legacy of the Downyflake. When you go and sit down at the counter on Saturday morning, the other men look at you and remember. Do they remember you for the people you fired or for the curriculum you wrote? Do they remember you for detentions and petty rules and bubble exams? Or do they remember you for being the one person who would listen when noone else cared.

If they do, they will nod and smile.

Read, Write, Think, and Speak....Better.
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