The Transformation of a Teacher

Mrs. Westpfahl was at least a thousand years old, tall and skinny with knobby elbows and old lady hair of an indeterminate color. That first day of history class—my least favorite subject next to math—she told us "I don't care what side of an issue you're on, as long as you're not sitting on the fence." It was my junior year and for the first time, we were required to write essay papers. Mrs. Westpfahl  taught us how to do it, and slowly a new world opened up to me. In the ancient, beautiful, and soon to be replaced Plainfield, New Jersey library, I stood on wobbly stools to pull down books from the shelves, searching their indexes for Jim Crow laws or the history of birth control (which had been legalized for married couples only the year before! Hard to imagine.) I pored over the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, thrilled by the fact that so much information was at my fingertips. I sat at the old library tables, the same tables my mother had studied at forty years earlier, and wrote snippets of information on note cards, stacking them lovingly, watching the pile grow. I put the cards in order, created an outline and typed the essay on our old Smith Corona, never guessing I'd just completed a process that would one day be the same I used to write twenty-one novels (except for the Smith Corona, thank God).

It was the era of the civil rights movement, the year Plainfield was torn apart by riots from which it's never fully recovered. My essay on Jim Crow opened my eyes to the roots of what was happening in my city and when I joined the marchers downtown, I knew which side of the fence I was on.  I went into my essay on birth control with the premise that abortion should not be legalized (good Catholic girl that I was) but as I researched the history of women's reproductive rights, I found myself leaping completely over the fence on that one.  

By the end of the year, Mrs. Westpfahl had changed dramatically. She was fifty-eight at best, slender, smiling, beautiful and wise. She's the person I think of with gratitude with each book I write, each newspaper I read, and each time someone asks me the question "Who was your favorite teacher?"

Who was yours?