HomeTown
Willie and the Bull A boy on a bike, a writer for the ages, and the teacher who brought them together
BY JIM DODSON
I
turned a corner and suddenly there she sat, her tiny round head dwarfed by a huge atlas of the world. This was at the downtown public library in the early summer of 1983. I was passing through my hometown on my way to a job interview at The Washington Post. “Miss Smith?” I said, tentatively. She rolled up her good eye and gave a friendly snort. “Oh, yes. How nice to see you.” She pointed to an empty chair. “Please do sit down.” Louise Smith was a Greensboro institution, my junior year English teacher in 1970, a chunky spinster with a half-closed eye who stood barely five feet tall and oddly resembled, well, a slightly bemused bull, hence the unflattering nickname bestowed by generations of Grimsley students. More than a decade had passed since I’d last seen the little woman who was most responsible for making me into a writer. But she acted as if it had only been a matter of days. For the record, my father’s two younger brothers, James and Benny, both had Miss Smith for English at then-Greensboro High School in the late 1930s, not long after she graduated from North Carolina Woman’s College. I also knew she lived in a small house on Tate Street, a street named for my father’s great-grandfather, an itinerate Methodist preacher and land surveyor who helped lay out the modern boundaries of several counties in central North Carolina. So we seemed to be linked by some invisible Gordian knot long before I showed up in her class. On my first day in her survey of American literature and advanced composition, we learned she planned to retire at the end of the year, hoping to travel extensively because, as she pointed out with a chuckle — and I jotted this down — “Travel broadens the mind, television the rear end.” We all laughed, and someone sent a paper airplane bouncing off the blackboard producing another gale of laughter. The Bull was half-blind and seem to counter our modest acts of teenage anarchy with the kind of wry grace and tolerance that come from decades of guiding generations of witless wiseguys like us through the perilous straits of Walt Whitman and basic grammar. So for these reasons I had a soft spot for The Bull almost from the begin-
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
ning, even before I found myself reading Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut and pondering our midterm assignment to write a story for possible submission to the school’s annual short story-writing contest. The winning story would vie for the O.Henry Award, named for the Gate City’s most celebrated literary son, William Sydney Porter. Curiously, I probably knew more about Willie Porter than most of my contemporaries did because my father was a former newspaper man who loved the short fiction of Rudyard Kipling and O.Henry. Collected works by both men, not surprisingly, anchored my bedroom bookshelf. Moreover, as a kid who grew up pedaling a bike over the same streets where Willie Porter came of age, I’d spent enough time poking around in Porter’s reconstructed drugstore in the Greensboro Historical Museum to feel a modest kinship with the plucky local fellow who struck off to make his fortune at age nineteen and wound up becoming one of the most popular writers of the Gilded Age — even more famous than Mark Twain for a time. For my contribution, I wrote a short story about my late grandfather, a rural polymath named Walter who helped wire the Jefferson Standard Building in 1922. The story concerned the last summer of his life, based on family tales I’d picked up knocking around his now-abandoned home place deep in the woods at the Dodson’s Crossroads, near Carrboro. To my great surprise, the story won the O.Henry Award for 1970, a prize given annually since 1923 by the O.Henry Study Club, and I was probably the most surprised kid in the class when The Bull announced my name.
O
n the last day of class, I stayed behind to wish her well in her world travels and thank her for inspiring me to keep reading and writing. At my mom’s suggestion, I even brought her some flowers. The Bull gave me a little book of Robert Frost’s poems. “You seem to like his work,” she said, adding: “Perhaps someday you’ll live in New England. Writing can take you a long way, if you’re willing to take this journey. ” I smiled at this, a tad embarrassed. It’s not easy being unmasked as a class clown, after all. That summer, though, I worked for the first time as the wire room boy at the August/September 2011
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