Mr. Collins Mr. O'Brien, and Sacco and Vanzetti

(Originally published 3/5/14)

Recently, while poring over miscellaneous scraps of paper from my past, I came upon an eighth-grade history test consisted of both a matching column and "True or False" section. Mr. Collins handwrote the test and had it mimeographed. That was the technology of the mid-1970s. One of the True or False questions was: “In 1924 the first pizza parlor in America was opened by Sacco and Vanzetti?” I’m proud to report that I answered it correctly as well as the previous question: “The 1920’s was a time of great hardship and depression?” As for the Sacco and Vanzetti reference, Mr. Collins, I suspect, would have to think twice today about associating an Italian surname with pizza pie. Somebody might turn him in for the offense—but, maybe not, it's only the Italians after all. Then again, everything is so standardized in the here and now that a Mr. Collins-style history test—we called it "Social Studies" back then—wouldn't even reach the modern-day equivalent of the mimeograph machine.

Another snippet of paper in my archives was a handwritten summary of the "Best of Mr. O’Brien," my geometry teacher in high school. While I didn’t care much for the subject matter, Mr. O’Brien was a true original—both a good teacher and a skilled performance artist. When the school year ended, and he informed us that he wouldn’t be returning in the fall—he got a better offer—I recall being profoundly saddened to think that I would never, ever see him again. His lectures were delightfully frenetic, and he loved nothing more than having fun with people’s names—both their first and their last. He was an Irishman who, above all else, enjoyed calling on kids with multi-syllabic Italian surnames. We had a fair share of them in our high school back then. Somebody named Provenzano in his class, for instance, had his name pronounced in a melodious singsong: “Pro-ven-zan-o.” He liked one-syllable names, too. A kid named “Bell,” I remember, rang well in the classroom.

From where I—and just about everybody else—sat, Mr. O'Brien's class is where entertainment met education, and his antics didn’t offend anybody. In fact, we wanted to be included in the give-and-take. "Oh, Nick...oh, Nick," are in my notes, so I was indeed, although the context eludes me all these years later. In fact, more than three decades have passed since the Mr. O'Brien hour and—sad to report—virtually everybody is conditioned to be offended for one reason or another nowadays. Mr. O’Brien quite possibly had to clean up his act at some point in his teaching career, if that is where he pitched his tent. (He probably was in his mid-twenties when I knew him.) If this is what indeed happened, the irony is that some of his students from the 1970s—who greatly admired him—did him in as the humorless, uptight adults they became.

(Photo from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)