Mr. Perry

The mention of using a spotlight as a hunting accessory in the last post reminded me of a story...

My sophmore year at Small Town High, I took World History with Mr. Perry. Mr. Perry was a big guy, about 1,000 years old, and a character. He had been teaching history since Christ was a corporal.

First day of class he went through the class list, taking attendance.

"Abby [Oldname]?" he barked. "[Oldname]? You Bob's daughter or Chuck's?"

My Dad and my uncle. It was a small town. My Dad and my uncle had been lively (that is, pain-in-the-ass) students and athletes back in the day.

"Bob's my Dad."

Mr. Perry peered at me. "Yeah, I remember Bob."

Mr. Perry had been a coach years ago, and retained the figured. Stoop shouldered and wrinkled, he was a big - not fat, just big - old man. In the summer, he supplemented his income by working as a part-time DNR ranger.

The man had a gift for gab. He taught the Norman Invasion of England in 1066 in two days of lecture. Just stomped back and forth across the front of the room, occasionally gesturing at a map of the British Isles, and telling a story.

It was a good story. You have to be a good storyteller to keep 25 high school sophmores hanging on every word for two days, and he did.

The Norman Invasion, though, was possibly the only subject that I don't remember him working poaching into. Like a lot of small-town woodsmen, he seemed to delight in those who operated just outside the game laws, even if he spent a portion of each year enforcing them.

"So these cave paintings, they'd have deer in them, right? Because deer were a food source for a hunter-gatherer population. Of course, they hunted with spears..."

A gleam would come into his eyes, and we'd know what was coming.

"And now spears, they aren't an easy way to hunt deer. We all know the easy way to put deer on the table..."

And by the end of the year, we could pretty much chant the next part right along with him.

"You get you a million-candlepower spotlight and a good .22 magnum, and you get in the back of a pickup and find somebody to drive you. And you drive these backroads real slow a couple hours after dusk and you shine that light out into the field until you pick up two eyes...."

Mr. Perry also did a mean moose impression, but I cannot for the life of me remember how that came up.

Mr. Perry was a widower, and it was a shame to think of all that personality wasting away alone at the end of the day. However... At the other side of the school, in the library, worked Mrs. Murphy.

She was the benevolent second-in-command at the high school library (which doubled as the town library), a tiny woman who radiated kindness and gentleness. That was fortunate, because the library was run by an ony-slightly-benevolent dictator who none of us were bright enough to appreciate at the time.

A few years after I left high school, Mr. Perry and Mrs. Murphy were married. I smiled when I heard the news - it was nice to think of her being kind to him, and of him making her smile with his jokes and stories.

It was still nice a couple years further down the line, when word reached me that Mr. Perry had died. He left behind, in addition to one very kind woman, thousands of former students who remember not only the Norman Invasion of England, but the best way to spotlight deer.