Grade-school teachers, now and then.

Maybe it's all those "Become a teacher and take your life in your hands" posters I've been seeing on the subway, but for some reason I've been thinking lately about all the people who taught me in grade school.

To be honest, I don't remember much about a lot of my teachers, except those few who traumatized me in some horrible way. Sometimes all I can remember, scanning back over them, is the hint of a face, or a name. Sometimes not even that much.

I guess I was lucky in that respect, in that most of my teachers had such unlikely names?from the improbably banal "Mrs. Brown" and "Mrs. Smith" to the tiny and round octogenarian spinster named "Miss Moe," to the wretched "Mrs. Herckmann" and the unintentionally iconic "Mrs. Appel."

Miss Moe taught second grade. I don't remember much about her except that she had always been 80, had always been teaching the second grade and always would be. Poor woman had lost her sense of humor somewhere along the way, and had no patience left for the wicked ways of the young people of 1972. I do remember Ron Jacobs, the class clown, swinging the door open and sauntering into class one day. Glancing around and not seeing her anywhere, he asked (quite loudly), "Hey?where's cool baby Moe?"?completely unaware that she was behind the door, watching his every move.

She couldn't stand to hear people using the words "cool" or "baby."

Well, that's pretty much all I remember about Miss Moe. The teacher who got me started on all this came along three years later, in fifth grade, after I'd moved from Webster Elementary across the street to the much taller Allouez School. At the time it stood on a lot adjacent to the biggest cemetery in town, and now it's an Osco Drug. (It's been an Osco Drug for more than a decade now, and I still can't get over it.)

His name was David DeGroot, and he was one of the few teachers who ever let on what his first name was. He taught that broad, fuzzy area that was part civics, part language arts, part everything else that wasn't math, science or gym. He was a soft-spoken man I'd guess to be in his early 30s, with a bit of a paunch (unavoidable in Wisconsin) and a thin, droopy moustache.

As they'll do with any teacher, the kids made fun of him behind his back. They made fun of his name, they made fun of his comb-over (which most mistook to be a really bad, improperly glued toupee) and they made fun of the fact that his voice tended to crack a lot, especially when he got upset.

Although I was more than willing to crack wise about most any teacher, I tended to leave Mr. DeGroot alone. He was a good guy, he was more patient than most of them and he was smart. But there was more to it than that?he was also the first teacher I ever had who treated me more like an adult than just another one of his students. He seemed to take a personal interest in what I was up to.

I realize that in this day and age, you hear someone say something like that about a teacher, the alarm bells go off and the suspicions are raised. But there was nothing creepy about it.

Like an awful lot of kids at the time, I was fascinated by Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle. So, I came to discover, was Mr. DeGroot. We'd share the books we were reading with each other and exchange notes that week's episode of In Search Of...

(Just an aside here. For all the episodes In Search Of... devoted to various monsters and aliens and ghosts and witches, the one that really scared me?I mean, really, really scared the shit out of me?was about the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. I'm not sure why, but it gave me nightmares for weeks.)

For some reason, Mr. DeGroot was always encouraging me to do extra research into these things?outside reading, newspaper archive research and the like. I don't remember getting any extra credit for this, but I still did what I could. I think he was just interested in seeing what I'd find out. And for my part, I learned an awful lot about researching, which came in very handy in later years.

There was one case I remember in particular. Some guy was sailing solo across the Atlantic, and was set to land in Florida. As he was passing through the Bermuda Triangle (which was still big in the news at that time), all communication with him went on the fritz. He seemed to have simply vanished, and no one could figure out why.

He reappeared a day and a half later, right as rain. After he landed, nobody ever mentioned the Bermuda Triangle business, not publicly at least, so Mr. DeGroot encouraged me to write him a letter and ask him what the heck happened out there. I quietly balked at that one. Library and newspaper research was one thing, but I was still iffy when it came to directly communicating with people. Plus, I had no idea where the guy lived.

I dunno. Mr. DeGroot just seemed to like me on a human level for some reason. It made me feel almost normal, after so many years of having everyone consider me a freak. As the year wore on, he told me about his wife, who was either Mexican or American Indian, and about the abject poverty her family lived in. He also complained quietly about how the school bureaucracy could interfere with the joy of teaching.

When you're a youngster, nine-, 10-, 11 years old, even if you don't fully understand everything they're saying, you still appreciate it when an adult?especially a teacher?talks to you like you were any normal human being and not a stupid kid.

As the years passed and I moved on to high school and college and grad school, through a flood of mostly unremarkable or just plain hapless teachers, I admit that Mr. DeGroot got lost in the shuffle there for a while. Then, in 1999, I released a little book and my publisher sent me on tour. One of the stops (as per my request) was Green Bay. The reading was scheduled to take place in the bookstore where I'd worked part-time for many years. It was a little chain operation in a shopping mall and was utterly unequipped to host a reading. No chairs, no table, no mic, no lamp. So basically it turned into a disastrous story hour for adults.

When I was finished, a few people stepped forward to say hello. A couple kids I'd been to high school with, some friends of my folks. After most of them had moved on, suddenly standing in front of me was Mr. DeGroot. Dim eyes aside, I recognized him immediately?he'd changed very little physically in the 25 years since I'd been in his class.

"You probably don't remember me," he began, "but?"

I stopped him there. His voice hadn't changed, either. And much to my surprise, I was even able to pull up his name right away. I usually can't do that.

He'd moved out of Green Bay a while ago to a smaller town a bit to the north. He'd quit teaching, too, but still worked as a substitute now and again. He'd seen something in the paper about the book or the reading, recognized my name and decided to come out. I found that pretty astonishing, but was awfully happy to see him. I was especially happy to finally have the chance to thank him for all he'd done. We don't get many chances like that.

A lot of people from my past crawled out of the woodwork on that tour, but Mr. DeGroot remained the one pleasant surprise along the way, apart from the fact that Miss Moe never showed up.