In addition to Miss Bobo, Jay's teacher Hall of Fame (He also has a Teachers' Hall of Infamy, but is sparing you that for now) includes the late William T. Slaughter. An accomplished organist respected for his technically superb and musically inspired renditions of Bach fugues, Mr. Slaughter taught band instruments in all six (!) grades at Aiken Junior and High schools. He was a one-person staff - no assistant teachers back then - ably assisted at the High School by a student staff that included (ta-da!) Jay.

Mr. Slaughter taught all the instruments. Reeds, flutes, percussion and brass. Glockenspiel and timpani, oboe, clarinet and saxophone. French horn and trombone. Maybe he knew and played stringed instruments, too, but he didn't teach them, referring interested students to teachers in nearby Augusta, Georgia.

He gave private lessons in a back room of his house in downtown Aiken, and Jay, who stuck with band from Seventh to Twelfth grades, was one of his students, a half-decent one in his later years. Jay played cornet, the "symphonic" version of the trumpet. At the outset of band class in the Seventh Grade, Mr. Slaughter examined the facial structure of each new student in turn and recommended an instrument that suited them. He probably skewed the choices to what instrumentation the high school band would need three years into the future, but he never let on. Jay's choices were cornet or French horn, the latter of which, Mr. Slaughter warned, was quite difficult to play.

Easy choice, really. Jay took the path of least resistance, with blessings from his father, who disliked music in general except for the military bugle call "Taps." After an impressively inauspicious start, Jay caught on to getting a sound out of the instrument, moved up to shaky scales and the occasional arpeggio, and kept at it, even practicing occasionally as whim and necessity dictated. When Mr. Slaughter recommended private lessons, Jay's parents footed the bill, and Jay's father even sprung for a silver Conn Connstellation cornet, the stuff of dreams for a cornetist then and now. He'd already bought a baby grand piano that took up much of the livingroom.

Jay's hero list took on new musical entries. Harry James, of course, because he was still the rage in the early Sixties. And Bourbon Streeter Al Hirt, who had popular tunes in the Top Forty of the day. Good ones.

Jay's love affair with music started even earlier, as his Sainted Mother insisted he have piano lessons. She so wanted to be able to play the piano herself, but didn't take lessons. Instead, she dutifully pursued a mailorder self-study course in which the middle piano keys were numbered on a cardboard overlay. The course ignored basics and moved right into songs. Eventually, she learned to play her favorite piece, "The Merry Widow Waltz," quite well, but after that she stopped studying.

On the other hand, Jay flopped at piano. He learned to read music and count rhythms, but never got the knack of reading both treble and bass clef lines at the same time. When he figured out that he could improvise the music by reading only the treble clef, that was the end of piano studies. After exhausting only two piano teachers, the first being one of his cousins, he got stuck on "Flow Gently Sweet Afton," and gave up, turning his attention to the cornet, which only entailed one clef at a time. He took up piano many years later and learned to play a few of his favorite classical pieces - long after giving up all hopes of professional musicianship.

Jay played first chair cornet in the Aiken High School Bands and helped organize the Pep Band at the University of South Carolinia (slash) Aiken. That was pretty much the end of his career, however - although at the urging of a colleague, an accordion player at the newspaper where he worked, he played hymns and carols with the Salvation Army Band on Main Street a few times. Decades later (see the picture and don't laugh at the hot pink hat), Jay again had delusions of musical adequacy and relearned the cornet, but that episode was cut woefully short by health and other troubles.

Here's another one, adapted from Jay's stellar endeavors as editor of Verbatim, the newsletter of the Midlands Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication. This tale is about his favorite High School English teacher. She's why you won't read certain... "phrases" in this tome. Okay, here's Jay.

Impeccably prim, our wool-suited English teacher strode in from the hallway. Sensible heels, tick, on the cheap tile floor. She dropped her gradebook onto the desk, set the battered wooden lectern aside and stood laser-level straight, pine-tree tall at the greenboards in front of the class. “B O B O,” she lettered in yellow chalk. Her bony hand made deliberate, precise strokes easily readable from the farthest reaches of the room. Perfect.

Miss Bobo was, herself, exactly that.  Perfect, unerring, unforgiving - and easily readable from the back row of seats.  She had certain “requirements” - demands, really - that had to be met, and she set them out methodically in stern tones on the first day of classes, emphasizing her points by stabbing her index finger toward the ceiling and lowering her gaze to peer over her dark-rimmed reading glasses after each one. Ominous, intimidating, intriguing.

Think and be

“Cogito ergo sum,” she began. Gaze. “Ergo, people who do not think do not exist. Therefore, in my class do not ever not think.” Meaning: don’t think you’ll pass Senior English at Aiken High. Miss Bobo’s cogito corollary was her dearest pet peeve, her biggest booboo, a Rubicon you did not cross. You did not answer her question about Chaucer’s Wife of Bath with “I don’t think she was a slut.” You could say “I think she wasn’t a slut,” or even “I don’t know.” However, mere utterance of the forbidden “I don’t think” got you a brooding frown and a red mark in her grade book. Sometimes even a sarcasm. But really, she had a point. Think not, be not; think and be. Be or be not, Shakespeare wrote, but think and at least be graduated, and then not-think your way through English 101 if you can.

Miss Bobo’s classes were advanced, “college prep.” All of her students would matriculate at some college, even me. It was her duty, her mission-from-the-diety, she explained, to make sure that we not only did not not-think, but also could indeed think. Cogito with the best of ‘em and communicate the fact verbally or in ink, without blinking an eye, and never omitting the dot over one, either. She warned us first thing, and reiterated her warnings anytime someone slipped up. She explained that she considered not not-thinking to be her personal goal for every class. I don’t think she ever failed.

Miss Bobo started every class with a short discussion of the material that her students, whom she insisted be seated in alphabetical order, should have read from the textbook or other resource. Her lectures were excruciatingly grammatical, meticulously organized, and beautifully incisive. “Every character has a flaw,” she orated on Chaucer’s Canterbury rimes. “The Wife of Bath, debatably, is promiscuous; the cook is dirty; the Miller, well, you’ll have to see for yourself.” Wicked wink. "If you dare."

Why: a favorite question

For testing, Miss Bobo didn’t think in terms of true/false or multiple guess. She thought essays - well organized, well thought out, and skillfully argued. “Compare the... with those from...” and “discuss why....” Keyword “why,” a favorite question of hers, and often a difficult one for which there is no simple, or even correct, answer. Stick close to the subject, organize thoroughly before you set pen to paper or tongue to teeth, answer the question directly, and whatever you do, don’t make any Bobo booboos when you write. Or when you speak, even exemporaneously.

In addition to not not-thinking, she had a sizeable list of no-nos. Here are some that have stuck with me after more than forty years. Some are here for entertainment, and some for admonishments. Some are way obsolete, now, and some still ring true. You’re on your own as to which is which. However, as with all of Miss Bobo’s booboos, you can’t be faulted for following them, though in some cases you can for breaking them.

Miss Bobo’s booboo list

> And what kind of sort is that?  In Miss Bobo's class there was never a sort of anger, nor a kind of repression. Miss Bobo despised the terms. She was quite binary about most things. Are you mad or not? You're either repressed or you're not, or maybe you could try to get a 'somewhat' past her if you must qualify. Well, are you or not, she still would have asked. And to which sort of repression do you refer, exactly? Is "somewhat" a disease or a degree? A fruit, perhaps?  Kind of funny, eh? Well, you sort of get her point. Don't you?

> “Not only” is not the only part of the construction, which not only won’t stand alone, but also won’t do with only “but” on the other side. In other words, if you start with “not only,” you absolutely must have “but also,” not just “but.” As in: “I think the Miller’s tale not only raises eyebrows, but also blazes trails in low-brow humor.” Moreover, the connected parts must not only be related, but also be parallel. Perfectly parallel, not just somewhat close. Sentence structure, tense, gender, number, and the tint of the spots on its underwear. Parallel to the max. “Everyone has a ‘but,’” she explicated-admonished-adjured with a smirk. “Cover yours with an ‘also,’ and your grade will reflect your effort.”

> Don’t divide. To split an infinitive was to incur Miss Bobo’s ire. There was no reason, no excuse to humanly err, and little probability for Bobo to divinely forgive.

> Don’t start. If you’re going to do a thing, just do it. Don’t begin or start something. This was a major biggie with her, and she was right. In the South we love to fix to do something. Like, “I’m fixin’ to start the turnips a-boilin’.” Best not speak that abomination in Boboland. Best not read much literature, either, or this one will start to bother you, too. Authors, even famous ones, sin often.

> Waste if you must, but never want. Not many emcees would pass Bobo’s class: “I want to welcome you all....” Nor Oscar winners: “I want to thank my mother....” Unless you’re not going to, she urged, don’t want to do something, just do it.

> Don’t partialize. Whether spoken or written, English sentences have subjects and verbs, at least one of each. If your sentence fragment had two or fewer words, and if you could defend it as contextually sound without sweating, you might have a chance to get one over. Otherwise, no.

> Precisely write precise words. For example, don’t use “less” if you need “fewer.” Less is quantity; few is number: less flour, but fewer cups of sugar. Further is conceptual, farther is space. Subtle, but true. Precision, precision!
> She preferred and encouraged the correct use of “more than” instead of “over” when “over” is just plain lazy, which most of the time it is. You could write “over the fence” but “more than fifty yards,” not “over.” Picky, but correct, in her Chaucer’s Knight’s way. The Knight’s character flaw, she explained, spewing and obviously relishing self criticism, was a perfectionist.

>This and that won’t stand for everything. Picture a paragraph of action, sentence after sentence, after which the sumup “this” can’t stand for all of that and keep on going, like:  “Smith threw rocks at me, and this made me mad.” The word “this” must be specific, like “this action” or “this situation.” Otherwise Smith will keep on with the rocks, gleefully assisted by Miss Bobo.

In addition to her peeves list, she invoked the usual forbidden constructions like passive voice, verbs to be, lazy adjectives and adverbs, run-on sentences, and such. However, she was willing to cut some slack on most of these if you could argue persuasively that the context justified the infraction. The class was creative writing and literature. She took “creative” creatively, and encouraged breaking conventional rules. Except hers.

Forbidden reading

Miss Bobo cleverly “assigned” extracurricular reading that was prohibited by the benighted Aiken, South Carolina, school district’s vigilant thought police. Chaucer’s infamously bawdy Miller’s tale, for example. Although printed unexpurgated in the course’s textbook, it was forbidden reading. She explained, simply, that the county’s all-knowing censors did not, repeat not, permit her to assign us to read the tale, because of its racy content, and she would not dare defy them. If we did want to read it, however, she was not in a position to stop us, and felt no obligation to prohibit speaking or writing about it in class. Indeed, she kept a little list. 

The same prohibitions applied to certain works of Huxley, Orwell and others – a list of which, she said with a smirk, she had dutifully mimeographed while off of school property and would distribute after class outside the walls of her room. She had just enough copies for every one of the thirty-eight students. The purple-lettered page was entitled “Forbidden Reading List.” In keeping with the rules with which she did not agree but was obligated to follow, she suggested we not check out any of the offensive literature from the county’s public library according to  Dewey’s decimals printed on the sheet.

The school’s own library didn’t have them so don’t bother looking, but the county library maintained multiple copies of each on hand. Neither should the banned books be purchased in paperback from local bookstores or from the book sections of the local dimestores, most of which carried them in stock. Nuff said. In a short time the entire class, including both preachers’ sons and the Jewish kid, could expertly discuss the offending volumes. Miss Bobo did not assign them for reading. She didn’t have to.

Rules and booboos notwithstanding, Miss Bobo strongly encouraged creativity, especially if you could creatively break a rule and defend it (vigorously) as essential to the context. Ask “why” if you wish, but prepare for an extended hairsplitting explanation that delved into reams of thought far beyond high school. I loved every minute of her class. However, I waited till I got to college to break any of her rules.