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This piece originally ranin Salon's Ivory Tower section as part of a package of Valentine tributes to memorable teachers.
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one valentine too late
I FEEL BAD ABOUT MOST OF MY TIME IN SCHOOL.
I started off on the right foot. Having taught myself to read at the age of 4 -- with immeasurable help from "Sesame Street" -- I was desperate to start kindergarten. But by the second grade I was utterly bored.
I was also a smart-ass and my teachers, from late grade school through college graduation, suffered my derision. I was a pro at avoidance, at playing on teachers' weaknesses. I read maybe five of the books I was assigned in my K-12 years but consistently wrote A papers by regurgitating whatever the teacher had preached in class. By my senior year I had one teacher -- an honors government teacher -- apologizing to me for losing the paper I'd never written and another -- a French lit teacher who also happened to be a former nun -- dragging me from her classroom by my arm hissing, "You are the DEVIL!" for some seemingly inconsequential wisecrack I'd made.
I feel really bad about that. And about a lot of excellent teachers of whom I took no advantage. But it's small change compared to how bad I feel about Lonn Beaudry. Lonn was one of several really outstanding graphic design instructors I had the benefit of studying under in college. I had two design professors whose opinions I lived and died by and upon whose every word I hung. Lonn was not one of them.
Lonn was the funny guy -- the guy we laughed at and with. Skinny and nerdy and extremely fey, Lonn always wore a white polo shirt with a lapel pin for some cause stuck to the pocket. His greatest compliment for student work was "This is just yummy," and he threw great parties with his lover, Roger, at their much-lauded house among their museum-quality furniture collection.
But he was also an excellent teacher, a fact that I characteristically discounted until long after I'd graduated. He was one of a distinguished class of graduates of the Cranbrook Academy of Art who were making their mark on the profession as a whole. Lonn's forte was that he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of design -- graphic, industrial and architectural. He not only knew the facts, he had colorful quotes and stories to go along with everyone and everything. He knew which designers were bitter rivals. Who had a crazy wife. Who stole an entire typeface (in the form of metal letterpress characters) from Switzerland in the trunk of a car and brought it to America. He taught us so much simply by dropping an anecdote here and there between project critiques.
I still have my notebook from his history of design class, but it's just a souvenir since I remember nearly every word he said. His knack for storytelling made for a stand-up comedy style of lecturing that had me, for the first time in my life, riveted to something I could also call education.
Yet until a few months ago, I didn't realize just how much of Lonn's lore and influence I had incorporated into my own life and work. Recently my sister and I were home for a few days and went to visit our alma mater for a museum exhibit. I'd been thinking about Lonn a lot: how much of my library was based on interests I'd picked up from him; how often I'd been in a museum and recounted one of his anecdotes to whomever I was with; which chairs I own that I'd first learned to identify in his class. I was increasingly aware of the debt I owed him and more and more determined to tell him about it.
I had told my sister that I wanted to stop by the art building while we were on campus and say hello to Lonn, but faced with that old familiar building, I was flooded with all the reasons it wasn't worth the effort. He could have been in class or out for the day and I wasn't even certain he was still teaching. He'd always had a drinking problem -- I'd heard he'd been in and out of rehab lately. Hearing the news from an office secretary just wasn't how I wanted to find out that Lonn had moved on.
Three weeks later I got an e-mail from a former classmate informing me that Lonn had killed himself and that the funeral had taken place that very morning. He'd been fired for not showing up on the first day of the semester this fall and went back into rehab for two months. The day after he got out he had a drink and Roger said he was leaving. A few days later Lonn was dead.
I never knew what drove him to drink, and knowing how I felt about him would probably have made no difference at all. But it certainly couldn't have hurt. And I feel especially bad about that.
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