The question had me thinking: “Is there a teacher who has impacted your life and have you thought to tell them what it’s meant to you?”

I’m not talking about a parent, relative, friend or co-worker who was a mentor, or a person who set an example you wanted to follow. Rather, I’m thinking of an elementary or secondary school teacher that all these years later you wish you could thank.

Wally Rowe, my English high school teacher was such a person.  Reflecting on my high school teachers, he stands out as the most engaging. He was in his 40s, which made him “old” and “wise.” He wasn’t aloof, although he could be so engaged in teaching he didn’t see what was going on around him.

In appearance he was stately, or businesslike is probably a better adjective. He always wore a woolen herring bone sports jacket with deep pockets and a tie. Mr. Rowe, as we called him, loved fueling discussion. He was adept at doing it, too.

The class easily spent two weeks talking about Catcher in the Rye. He could have hardly chosen a better book for an all-boys class to read. I’m a slow reader, but Salinger’s story captivated me and in one of those rare occasions in high school, I found myself jumping ahead of the assigned chapters to learn what would happen to Holden Caulfield

Mr. Rowe, however, reined us in. This was not a story to be raced though but thoughtfully dissected. He’d sit on the edge of a student’s desk, usually somewhere in the middle of the room. Sometimes it was a lesson in sentence structure and the choice of words, but more frequently it was about what Salinger was seeking to get across – what could we learn from the story and what we thought.

On one of these discussions, he brought the class to a halt, opened his desk drawer and took out a box of Diamond wood matches, the ones you could strike on just about anything and they would light up. The matches didn’t surprise us since Mr. Rowe smoked a pipe that he kept deep in his jacket pocket.  Then he instructed the student on whose desk he was perched to hand each of us a match. Now he had our devoted attention. What did he have in mind? Might he ask us to do what we thought Caulfield would do in such a situation? Was this yet another way to draw into discussion?

Instead, we were asked to take a sheet of paper and given a half hour to write about the match. At first I focused on the match, soon finding that it could be summed up in a couple of sentences regardless of the number of adjectives used. I was flummoxed. How was I going to come up with 100 words or more? What I realize now is that Mr. Rowe was pushing us to be creative, to use the match to ignite a story of our own.

He collected our submissions and standing, started reading and critiquing our work. He didn’t tell us whose work he selected to read, which was kind.

As he read, smoke started emerging from his jacket pocket and the pipe he had failed to extinguish. A few of my bolder classmates sought to warn him, but he would not be interrupted. When the jacket started smoldering – or maybe the heat got to him – he suddenly realized what was happening.

The lesson of the match would become school legend.

Mr. Rowe sparked my imagination and with Catcher in the Rye showed me the power of a story.

I wish I had thanked him for that.