By Wright Danenbarger
The Faculty 1965-1990 The author chronicles the contributions of longtenured “good teachers” who served their students and Canterbury with exquisite precision, demanding rigor, and an indomitable passion.
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efore I began the process of writing this series of articles for the PALLIUM on the faculty of the first 100 years of Canterbury School’s history, Lou Mandler, who has been scouring the archives to feed me material and direct me to sources of inspiration, sent me this amusing passage from the teacher-narrator of the novel Fifth Business, by famed Canadian writer Robertson Davies: “Schoolmastering kept me busy by day and part of each night. I was an assistant housemaster, with a fine big room under the eaves of the main building, and a wretched kennel of a bedroom, and rights in a bathroom used by two or three other resident masters. I taught all day, but my wooden leg mercifully spared me from the nuisance of having to supervise sports after school. There were exercises to mark every night, but I soon gained a professional attitude towards these woeful explorations of the caves of ignorance and did not let them depress me. I liked the company of most of my colleagues, who were about equally divided 22
among good men who were good teachers, awful men who were awful teachers, and the grotesques and misfits who drift into teaching and are so often the most educative influences a boy meets in school. If a boy can’t have a good teacher, give him a psychological cripple or an exotic failure to cope with; don’t just give him a bad, dull teacher. This is where the private schools score over state-run schools; they can accommodate a few cultured madmen on the staff without having to offer explanations.” I really love the sensibility of this quote, especially as it favors the “exotic failure” over the dull teacher. I have looked actively for a way to fit it in to my two previous articles on the first two quarter centuries of faculty, but I have been stymied largely by the simple fact that the types of faculty members that rise to the level of being worthy of mention in these pieces are the “good men who are good teachers.” Needless to say, Canterbury has sustained itself and thrived on the work of this category of teacher. The third quarter of the
Canterbury’s most memorable faculty from this era were much more than good teachers; they stand out as good men and women. They succeeded here and made Canterbury a better school still in no small measure by being hardworking, dedicated and upright, and role models for young people.
School’s faculty history is, in fact, no different in this regard, and that is exactly what the quote puts into relief for me when I look at these men and women whose tenures mostly fell between 1965 and 1990. If you are reading this article and you had the privilege of being taught by or working with Jules Viau, Jim Shea, Gilda Martin, Jim Breene, John Coffin, Gerry Vanasse, Jack Graney, John Martiska, Walter Burke, Paul Cauchon, or the others I will mention here, you know exactly what I mean. Canterbury’s most memorable faculty from this era were much more than good teachers; they stand out as good men and women. They succeeded here and made Canterbury a better school still in no small measure by being hardworking, dedicated and upright, and role models for young people. That I knew and worked with some of these figures only confirms what everyone I’ve read and spoken to says about them. Canterbury certainly has seen its share of cultured madmen on the faculty, but it most certainly did not persist through the turbulent era of