The Off Season: Reading the collected letters of Jim Eslinger

By Mike Lunsford
Special to the Tribune-Star

In each of the last few years, I’ve gotten a letter or two in the mail from Jim Eslinger, my high school economics and psychology teacher. Mr. Eslinger — I just can’t call him “Jim” — was one of my favorite high school instructors, but I’ve come to respect him even more now for another reason altogether.

Most often, Mr. Eslinger takes pen in hand to tell me that he’s liked something I’ve written; since he’s an avid reader, himself. He’s particularly mentioned the columns I’ve done about my fondness for books. What he doesn’t know, until now, is that his letters have been some of the best reading I’ve done in years.

I remember quite a bit about Mr. Eslinger from my high school days. If I recall correctly, he started his career in education at Garfield before he moved to Terre Haute North when the last, great countywide school consolidation took place in 1971. I know that sounds epically dramatic, but it certainly was in those days; just ask a Purple Eagle or Black Cat, a Red Streak or Honey Bee who got caught in the transition. He was young, a snappy dresser — very wide ties and bell-bottomed, double-knit nylon dress pants were considered to be very cool then, as were ghastly white belts and Spartacus-sized leather watch bands — and he knew his stuff.

One of the things that I most liked about Mr. Eslinger, other than the fact that he allowed me to thread the projector on movie days and sit in the vicinity of several very attractive female classmates, was that he wanted me to learn something in his classes. To be sure, he was relaxed and funny, but ultimately you knew he was serious about education; his courses were no cakewalk, and I can’t imagine that he takes it any less seriously now. Yes, he’s still teaching.

But his letters — always handwritten, always four or five pages in length — are truly impressive. I’ve bemoaned the fate of good letter writing in this column before, but Jim Eslinger’s letters prove to me that the art isn’t dead just yet. As a matter of fact, Mr. Eslinger, who told countless stories in class, is still telling them.

For instance, in September 2006, he wrote to tell me about his love of reading. “About the fifth grade,” he wrote, “my father brought home from St. Louis, where he had been attending a sales meeting, ‘Tom Stetson and the Giant Jungle Ants.’ As ‘April in Portugal’ played over and over on the record player, I was held in thrall by the suspenseful novel. By the ninth grade, other boys’ novels had my full attention, most memorably ‘The Yearling’ by Marjorie Kinon Rawlings.”

Today, Eslinger is tackling things that are a little tougher than the predicaments of Tom Stetson. He’s trying to read all 100 novels on the Modern Library’s list of the best novels of the 20th century. As of the writing of his letter, he had about 40 of them left to go.

I’ve known a few teachers over the years — I just realized that I stepped into a classroom when I was 5 years old and have been going back as either a student or a teacher now for 46 straight years — that have rarely practiced what they preached when it came to being life-long learners. Their lectures have remained the same for 35 years, their old notes taped and yellowed and re-used class after class, year after year. Their interest in learning seems to have petrified. But through his letters, it’s clear that Jim Eslinger isn’t like that.

To say that he doesn’t wax nostalgic occasionally, however, would be wrong. Last fall, he mailed a piece of the past to me: the seating chart of my senior year economics class. Why he would keep such a document amazed me — he surely must have rented warehouse space someplace — but I was happy he sent it along. First, it gave me a sense of appreciation for the job he did: there were 32 students in that class, and just four of us — Jim Marietta, Eddie Bradbury, Charles “Shagg” Woods and me — were in the back row and surely more than a small test of his sanity.

With the names on that single sheet of paper, people like Monte McDonald, Lee Dickerson, Darby Cessinger, John Lynch, Tom Gadberry and Claudia Adams, Mr. Eslinger really took me back in time. It reinforced in me the feeling that kids, their names and faces and individual stories really do stay with teachers long after they graduate, often long enough for those same teachers to have the sons and daughters of their students in their classes, even their grandchildren.

Last fall, Mr. Eslinger sent a packet of short stories and essays along, telling me to “read these stories at your leisure so that you fully enjoy them.” I not only did that, but also I began to use two of them in my classroom. I think it’s something special when a teacher you had three decades ago can still reach out and touch my life, and the lives of my students.

And it’s obvious that he’s still touching lives. In his last letter, he told me that he had just asked the students in one of his classes, “How many of you have ever read a book that had you in a state of breathless suspense?”

To his amazement, half the students raised their hands. “Warmth emanated from this old grizzled heart,” Eslinger wrote. “I am hopeful that some of the students felt, ‘Hey, am I missing something?’ and would become readers, too.”

When I think back to my high school days, I can still picture my friends and me in Jim Eslinger’s class, our student desks lined in a double-rowed semi-circle around the room while he scribbled away on the chalkboard. If I remember correctly, I also think Mr. Eslinger rewarded my efforts in Econ with a B+.

I thought about asking for extra credit for writing this story, you know, just to bump that grade up to an A. But getting another letter in the mail will be just fine.