Rodney Sheratsky: More Than A Maker of Minds

As I watched scores of teachers gather outside the Ritz-Carlton Hotel atop Nob Hill in San Francisco in a protest against Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the scandalously pathetic state of California schools, I could almost hear the voice of Dr. Rodney E. Sheratsky.

Inside, dinner guests were shelling out $100,000 per plate for the honor of having dinner in the same ballroom as the governor. Sheratsky might murmur, "Evelyn Waugh said it best, Bruce, 'This is all rather ill-making.'"

Rod Sheratsky was a treasure who lived atop the majestic outline of the sheer cliffs of the Palisades that hover over the Hudson River, framing the New York City skyline across the water. To me and to countless numbers of his students, he'll remain one of the monuments of the region.

My former English/Journalism/Film/Humanities high school teacher at Northern Valley Regional High in Demarest, New Jersey lived in nearby Fort Lee, just over the magnificent George Washington -- the bridge of my childhood. That's so he could always have quick access to his beloved New York. He'd regularly jump on the bus for Lincoln Center ... Carnegie Hall ... some off-Broadway play or a gallery in Soho, his wallet filled with membership cards to the MOMA, the Guggenheim, the Met and so on. His young students would marvel and sometimes snicker at this eccentric man who would take a Manhattan hotel room for two weeks out of the year so he could attend the New York Film Festival and see movies morning, day and night. Today that really sounds wonderful to me.

"I'm grateful now that I used to do that," Rod told me last year. "Today I couldn't do it physically."

Rod died in New Jersey on March 18, 2005. He was 71.

I never found out about that doctorate he had attained when he was so young. It must have had something to do with the arts or humanities -- but I figure it had more to do with humanity itself. He really was an expert at getting a kid to wonder about things -- to realize there is a
curious beauty behind the ordinary. And that there was irony and humor and intangibles that move us because they are spoken only in the heart.

We stayed in touch over the years. He was a one-of-a-kind peach who was always giving something to someone -- even when they didn't always know what was being passed along to them.

When Alan Dundes, the UC/Berkeley folklorist, died this year an obituary revealed that a former student was so grateful for all he learned from his teacher that he gave Dundes a million dollars. I wish I could have given Rod a million bucks. It would have been fun to see how he would've given it away. And he would have. I'm pretty sure he would've endowed at least a few libraries. When my book, "Bellingham by the Bay" was published, Rod scarfed up five copies and donated one to my high school library -- and one to the public library in my hometown, Closter, New Jersey. He also gave a copy to Uma Thurman, who was performing in an off-Broadway production just because he knew that would amuse me. I have no idea if it amused Ms. Thurman.

Sheratsky co-wrote a book about a British documentarian, "Humphrey Jennings: More Than A Maker of Films." Rod was certainly more than a teacher of students. One day, in the classroom (I was a freshman and this was the 1960s), I was in a snit about something. I think that's
when I got kicked out of Honors English for the usual dereliction of duty and, no doubt, dishonoring English in some way. Rod nonchalantly dropped a napkin on my desk. It was filled with sugar cubes that he had nicked from the cafeteria. You see, he'd read in the New York Times that the latest psychedelic rage with all the kids was to gobble up LSD-laced sugar cubes and embark on something called "an acid trip."

How could I stay mad after that? My teacher was a co-conspirator for my mischief. We chuckled privately for hours.

He tagged along with me when I, at the age of 14, had arranged for an interview with Allen Ginsberg at the poet's New York Lower East Side apartment. Knowing Ginsberg's notorious reputation for pot-smoking and pedophilia, Rod pretended he "just wanted to meet this man of letters."

We ran the interview as a full-page piece in the school newspaper, of which Rod was faculty advisor. Only later did I realize how much heat Rod had taken for such an outlandish expedition. This was 1966, the Viet Nam War was just getting really hot, the nation was beginning to
come apart, and we're running an interview with this Commie peacenik pothead fag? Rod was my protector and took the brunt of the criticism from the faculty. He also taught me to have the courage to stand by my work. When I told Rod that the football players had hanged me in
effigy, he was unrepentantly delighted. Years later, a famous actress, Mercedes McCambridge, imparted the same sentiment to me: "Only those who get themselves into trouble are worth the time of day."

Rod despised sentimentality and some of the drippy things that make up popular culture. He passed up the usual staid poetic works that clogged the curriculum in order to introduce his English classes to Walt Whitman's "To A Prostitute." On that occasion, he would tell a pupil,
"You'd better close the door before we get into this." He'd refer to the beloved Julie Andrews movie that gained an almost reverential status as "The Sound of Mucus." By the way, Rod adored Pauline Kael, who was fired from McCall's for writing a scathing piece, "The Sound of Music: The Sound of Money." For Rod and Ms. Kael, it was always open season for sacred cows that produced too much saccharine. "Those who get themselves into trouble ..."

I recall when Rod took our high school film class (hard to imagine we even had a film class back when the government really spent money on schools) on a field trip to see "2001: A Space Odyssey." But we HAD to see it in Cinerama, he said. That meant going all the way to Montclair, N.J. And sitting in the first few front rows in order to get lost in the movie. (That was to get a notion of Kubrick's own aesthetic cinema dimension, don't you know.)

Because of Rod, I saw my first opera, it was Puccini ... my first Picasso ... my first Ferlinghetti ... my first Bertolucci ... my first play by Strindberg ... my first Marx Brothers movie ... had my first ice cream soda on Washington Square. Last year, when I called him from Manhattan to announce I was taking the bus over the George Washington Bridge to Jersey to visit him, his
voice took on a disarming gravitas.

"You know that I am remanded to a wheelchair, Bruce," he intoned solemnly.

"Yes, Rod, I know about that."

"Well," he whispered with mock sincerity, "they used to call it syphilis but now they call it Parkinson's."

He never stopped being funny.

When he invited me to take whatever I wanted from his book collection, I knew it was a goodbye from him. It broke my heart. He could no longer hold a pen in his trembling hands so he had me inscribe the books to myself. That was so like him.

"One thing before you go," he said. "Can you show me how this thing works?"

Someone had given him a cell phone. I sorted through the package and found a number for it.

"Here, Rod," I instructed, "you hold this." Standing a few feet from him, I called his number from my cell phone.

It worked. Pretending to be startled by the call, he chirped into it, "Uh, hello? Who is this?"

"It is I, Rod," said I, standing next to him.

"Oh, all those years of teaching English grammar just paid off! You said, 'It is I.'"

Then he added, "I want you to know, Bruce, that I love you."

"I love you, too, Rod."

It was all very cinematic -- like a Godard movie -- actors closing a long distance in a small room. But after all this time, Rod was never really far from me. I can hear him right now, "Ah, but let's face it. We had some damned good fun."

Bruce Bellingham is the author of "Bellingham by the Bay" (Council Oak Books, San Francisco). He would like everyone to know that he has no plans to terrorize the local culture by taking up teaching.