Education: Stranger in Town

Pointing a finger at Schoolteacher Franklyn Olson, 23, the justice of the peace intoned: “Young man, your crime is as serious as if you had given them marijuana cigarettes.” Olson’s crime: assigning five schoolboys in Thompson, Mich, to read The Stranger, by France’s late Nobel-prizewinning Novelist Albert Camus. Olson’s sentence: a $100 fine and 90 days in the county jail.

Teacher Olson first read the sharp novel, one of the landmarks (1942) of existentialist fiction, when a woman professor gave it to him at Augustana College in Rock Island, Ill. A slow reader, he was impressed by the book’s “contemporary relevance” and also by its short, swift sentences. In one gulp, he downed “this story of man trying to tell the truth,” and it stuck with him when he went home from college last year to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. There he applied for a teaching job in the hamlet of Thompson (pop. 296), which has an odd hiring system—teacher candidates are asked to submit salary bids. Olson bid $3,790, and wound up with Thompson’s fifth, sixth and seventh grades.

Last spring Olson submitted a new bid for this year of $4,100, and his contract was not renewed. But long before this error, Olson had made another. When five average-bright boys in his room shunned all reading, Olson remembered The Stranger’s powers. To get them interested in reading, he gave the lads paperback editions of the book, assigned the first chapter. In short order, one 13-year-old’s mother discovered “obscene” passages. She called another mother, who called the school board, which called the state police, who arrested Olson. In his nearby home town of Escanaba the Press headlined the story: TEACHER FURNISHES

LEWD BOOKS TO CHILDREN.

While Olson was in jail, the state police also rummaged through his cottage without a search warrant, removed and destroyed several of his books. Among them: Crime and Punishment and One, Two, Three, Infinity, a lively treatise on numbers by Physicist George Gamow.

Unaware of his legal rights, Olson stayed in jail for twelve days without realizing that he could get out by paying $300 bail. Then to his rescue came Attorney Clair Hoehn, president of the school board in Gladstone, 40 miles from Thompson. “Ridiculous,” said Hoehn, after reading The Stranger himself. “This boy just wanted his students to have some different reading than ‘Run, Dick, run.’ “

Attorney Hoehn soon discovered something even more ridiculous: Justice of the Peace Howard Magoon jailed Teacher Olson under an obscenity law that Michigan repealed in 1957. Last week Circuit Court Judge George Baldwin threw out Olson’s conviction. Any “lurid remarks” in The Stranger, ruled Baldwin, are “minor” compared to many in the Bible. But former Teacher Olson is still vainly trying to find a job of any kind in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.