Education: Second to None

Falcon (“Bunk”) Guthrie, 16, was no

great shakes as a student. He preferred

baseball to books, had no interest in

‘grammar and stuff like that.” But when

the district high school, in the sleepy,

general-store town of Volens, Va. (pop.

100) got a new English teacher, Bunk sat

up and took notice.

Teacher Roy Fisher, 22, just out of the University of South Carolina, was like no teacher Bunk had ever heard of. In his green corduroy jacket, Mr. Fisher could pitch horseshoes and he could square-dance. But he also knew something about symphonies and poetry. On the walls of the classroom, he hung reproductions of paintings by artists Bunk did not know: Cezanne, Bellini, Rouault, Rousseau, Winslow Homer. And on the blackboard, he wrote things like “The best portion of a good man’s life, according to Wordsworth, is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.”

Bunk and his schoolmates—girls in print dresses and boys in checkered shirts and blue jeans—began to read some of Mr. Fisher’s books. And Bunk had to admit that literature wasn’t at all bad—”the way Mr. Fisher teaches it.”

One day last year, Bunk wrote a letter about Roy Fisher for a contest sponsored by the Quiz Kids to pick “The Best Teacher of 1947.” When the judges picked Mr. Fisher for only a third prize ($500), Bunk was hopping mad. This year he put up an argument with another letter: “I don’t think Mr. Fisher is second to any teacher. I think he’s the best. I feel pounds lighter when I enter his door.” Last week, a Quiz-Kid committee of college professors admitted that Bunk was right by naming Roy Fisher “The Best Teacher of 1948.” Fisher will get $1,000 in cash, a $1,500 scholarship to any university he chooses, and a visit to Chicago. (Omitted prize: a “body-beautiful treatment,” for winning schoolmarms.)

Teacher Fisher, raised in Volens by a bachelor uncle and a maiden aunt, hopes to study for an M.A. at either Columbia or the University of Chicago. But he will come back to a country school (“That’s where I want to be”). He doesn’t worry much about his $1,650 salary: “I didn’t enter teaching to get rich.”