Allen-Stevenson's 1977 Yearbook Thanked the Coach, Then Made a Request

I read this aloud at dinner. My wife said it sounded like me. I said I'd have to call her back.

The page is a proper dossier, signed off with his initials, DWK. He had joined in 1969 to teach fourth grade, then moved upstairs to seventh-grade math and the sports job. Under him, the boys claim, the Unicorns had been the scourge of Randall's Island since 1973, the year his reign began, which they call his "pontificate." That is a big word, deployed by thirteen-year-olds, at a gym teacher.

Then the evidence mounts. He directed student plays, including a 1973 production called The Day They Parachuted Cats on Borneo, in which, the captions take pains to say, the giant rat is not him. He painted the sky for a Gilbert and Sullivan backdrop, which another caption blames for the Northern Lights appearing over Mount Fuji. He is caught at last in one football photograph, having "successfully avoided the last 43 team pictures."

Forty-three. I have avoided two family portraits and have never heard the end of either.

The boys thank him as a friend and co-commiserator when things are rotten, which is the most accurate description of a middle-school coach I have read, and say he will be missed when he goes to Brazil for a sabbatical in the spring of 1978. Then, having spent a page on gratitude, they remember why they came. Thanks for everything, DWK, the last line says, "now can you get us a game with Buckley Country Day?"

The yearbook does not record a reply. He was on the other line.

Allen-Stevenson has always been good at taking a ribbing. The school's own history of its after-school program says boys from another school saw "A-S" on the athletic shirts, started calling the teams "Alligator Soup," and "our boys loved it!" The name stuck, and today the after-school program is called Alligator Soup.

I have tried this at home. The middle one called my Saturday pancakes "Dad's Disappointments" for a month, and I put it on the menu board. He still asks for them by name. He still doesn't eat them.