The Alexander City Outlook

Alex City’s phony professor

Back when I entered high school, we did so in the seventh grade.

Grammar school was from the first through the sixth grades, and they were in a low, rambling brick building next door to the High School. Neither of these buildings exists today, but they were vaguely on the site of the present day middle school.

To enter high school in the seventh grade was quite daunting. We were put in the same school with all these sophisticated teenagers. In grammar school, we had been herded around and coddled and told where to go and what to do. We had only one teacher per grade, and our reputations were established by then. We did not have to prove anything, and our friends were already made.

When we entered high school, it was like stepping into another world with everything new. There was a new building (which was actually old but unfamiliar), new faces (all older) and new teachers about whom we knew nothing. This meant that we would have to go through the difficult exercise of establishing ourselves and making new friends and gaining new reputations. What a chore! There was the added complication of having a different teacher for each subject and class. Other students seemed to slip into this new system without any trouble, but, for me, it was quite a difficult exercise.

There was the added burden of sometimes having a coach for a teacher. Since I was unathletic to the extreme, I faced this contingency with great trepidation. I had to pretend to be far more macho than I really was. Another unexpected problem was the school bully, which I had never encountered before. My friend solved the problem of kicking the bully in the face when my friend was run aground, but I lacked the courage for this, plus I visualized horrible torture as retribution for such an audacious act.

Anyhow, there were great rewards to being in high school. We were part of a student body, which elected the homecoming queen, and, later on, we would be contemporaries of the big football stars. All the distant heroes and heroines became real persons and even friends. We also elected the cheerleaders and went to games with a personal knowledge of everybody connected with the team, the band and the cheerleaders.

Those friendships and acquaintances could be used to hang over the heads of upcoming fifth and sixth graders whom we would encounter in Sunday School. In high school, we encountered different teachers with different styles and personalities. Some of them were new, and, occasionally, it would be their first year of teaching, which made us guinea pigs. Yet, some of the teachers were excellent. Others, of course, were incomprehensible. One such teacher called himself Dr. Don P. Hawkins who came from Florida. In those days, there was an extreme shortage of teachers, and not too much checking on past records was done.

Dr. Hawkins had the whole town fooled. He made all sorts of claims, which were swallowed by most people. He claimed to have been the president of a Florida college, and his doctor ordered him to rest and to take a less demanding job. That seems to be why he wandered into Alex City, and he claimed to have expertise in exactly the same subjects where there was a teacher vacancy. In this case, it happened to be Latin and journalism. The year before, I had taken Latin under one of the best teachers in town. She was forced to resign in order to care for an aged father. The journalism teacher, also excellent, had moved out of town with her husband. So there were two specialized vacancies, and, miraculously, Dr. Hawkins was qualified to fill them. I took both classes, which were unqualified disasters, and it was not long before we realized that our teacher knew nothing about these subjects.

Finally, Dr. Hawkins was caught. He happened to be a kleptomaniac in addition to his other peculiarities. One night, a suspicious teacher waited half the night to catch Dr. Hawkins in a theft. When he was confronted, the phony professor went straight home, packed his bags and disappeared early the next morning.

As far as I know, he was never seen or heard from again except for one encounter by a lady who lived out of town and who Dr. Hawkins did not know. She pretended that she never heard of the gentleman, so nothing came of the meeting.

This is just one example a con-man coming into town. Of course, it was easier back in those days when there were no computers and qualifications were not so standardized. The extreme shortage of teachers contributed to the fact that it wasn’t so difficult to land a job.

This is just one example of such a problem. We were very innocent back in those days, and we were more trusting. I could write about other examples, for instance, we had a minister who was almost as bad; but that is another story for another issue.

Jack Coley’s column on Alexander City appears each Thursday.