Mr. John Clapp

Gertrude Eldred’s desk next to the second floor windows gave her a narrow view of the front lawn at Old East End School, where scores of her pupils ran about or played after finishing their brown bag lunches.

 As Principal, it was Miss Eldred’s custom to choose some lucky child each day to come and ply his or her weight against the heavy, braided rope that climbed up into the belfry, and ring the great cast-iron bell to signal that it was time to go back to class.

 Few if any of the children likely gave it any thought, but in three more days the bell would toll no more, for a gleaming new building was being readied on Valleyview Street and East End School would eventually be demolished.

 With the new building came an expanded number of classrooms and several new teaching positions, one of which would go to a 25 year-old former Air Force Sergeant named John W. Clapp.

 Miss Eldred asked one of her teachers, Tom Cody, to take John Clapp through the old building that warm spring afternoon so that he might be introduced to his new colleagues.

 Young Mr. Clapp hardly needed to be shown about; the son of a local barber, his mother a nurse, he was a native East Ender and a graduate of the local Normal School.

 Still sporting his Air Force crewcut, John Clapp embodied a dichotomous blend of strength and humility as he trod the worn creaking boards of the old 19^th Century building.  The children who saw him pass understood innately that they liked him.

 He stood about 5’10” and 170 pounds, was trim and athletic, but was likely too self-effacing to know how extraordinarily handsome and engaging he was with his wide and ready smile, fair complexion and rosy glow.  Despite his undeniable appeal, his ears were set so wide that you’d half expect they’d flap when he turned his head.

 “I look like a taxi cab coming down the street with both doors open” he once joked in class.

 Exposed as they were to the elements, those ears were severely frost-bitten one morning when, as a teenager, he rode his little motor scooter to Academy Street School in 17 degree weather.

 His ears recovered, but he lost his name, as far as his friends were concerned.  For thereafter, to them, he was known not so much as John but as “Scooter”.

 Even years later, as a teacher at Valleyview School, he could be seen buzzing noisily through the pines in Wilbur Park on his way to coach football at Oneonta High;  his boss, Acting Principal John Higgins, clinging to the back of the scooter with white knuckles. 

 “What a couple of nuts,” one youngster remarked as he watched them pass one day, and he could only wish he were going with them. 

 All the boys clamored to be with John Clapp and win his attention and he lavished it on them abundantly.  He packed his free-wheeling lessons with energy, creativity, color and vivid detail, bringing history to life as students never had heard it.  And he imparted his vast and ranging knowledge to them as if he were talking not to uncomprehending children, but to fully-enfranchised adults.

 Many of the boys styled themselves after him, and though they passed on to the higher grades, informed and enriched, they graduated reluctantly for they would have preferred to stay behind with their mentor. 

 “When I was a boy, he was the only real father figure I ever had.” testified one of his pupils, who went on to serve as a doctor on the staff of the nation’s second largest hospital.

 Mr. Clapp drew from astronomical charts, historical maps, battle schematics, graphs of the elements, geological cross-sections, actuarial tables, commodity projections, the New Testament – anything that would take the students well beyond the narrow limits of sanctioned texts. 

 He had traveled the world and had read eclectically and his own thirst for learning took him and his protégés to the boundaries of knowledge.  The universe was his classroom. 

 Many years before most people even considered it, he warned his young students of an exhaustion of world oil reserves and inevitable war in the Middle East, and he hinted it might be foretold in Scripture.  Whether he was talking about the bombing of Hiroshima, the courtship of Miles Standish or the destruction of the Delaware & Hudson Roundhouse, his descriptions were not mundane facts to be tediously memorized, but rather like fluid dramas manipulated by unforgettable characters.

 Sometimes the children remembered to raise their hands to interrupt him, but often their questions burst from their lips because they could no longer hold them, and unbridled debates and pontifications would erupt. 

 “What’s the shortest sentence in the Bible?” he intoned one day in the midst of an explanation about syntax. 

 Theodore Close, the class braintrust, didn’t know.  Judy Super, the high school English teacher’s daughter, didn’t either.  Little Jimmy Seward, the future state senator, was stumped, but ah, Ricky Shumway, the house painter’s son, thought he knew.

 “Jesus wept,” he replied after some hesitation.

 “Jesus wept,” Mr. Clapp repeated, and for a brief moment at least, the cacophony of learning quelled to quiet contemplation.

 On Sunday August 14^th, John Clapp, 75, stepped to the front of the sanctuary at First United Presbyterian Church on Main Street in Oneonta, his son Tim beside him with a trumpet, as they performed together for the first time in public.  Tim played and his father sang the old standard hymn “Softly and Tenderly.”

 As he reached the final stanza of his solo singing “Jesus is calling me,” Mr. Clapp collapsed to the floor and no one would hear his rich, throaty baritone again.  He died the following Sunday, leaving behind instructions that there be no funeral or service – just a simple burial in the cemetery next to the place where Old East End School stood that warm sunny day in 1956 when he was first introduced to his new colleagues.

 Why had he specified no funeral?  Because he didn’t see the point to it. “No one is going to remember me when I die”  he had explained indifferently to a friend.

 An ironic viewpoint for a man whose admirers were legion.

 Though he never earned a Ph.D., never ran for mayor, never wrote a best seller, flew in space, nor invented a light bulb, he devoted his enormous energy to his church, his country, numerous community activities, his family, and of course his students, and asked for little recognition.

 And you needn’t have bothered trying to flatter him by telling him he was the best teacher you ever had, because he would just bow his head and turn you aside; he had more humble ideas about who he was.  Ironically he might have been surprised to know that word of his demise reached the Atlantic and Pacific shores and was received as far away as the other side of the world before sunrise the next day.

 The news was passed not by television or radio or the press wires, but word of mouth, one by one, from those who had the privilege to have known him and loved him.

 It was like the “shot heard round the world” he so often had taught about. 

 The thousands of people he touched dot the planet.  His pupils can be found everywhere from the Statehouse in Albany, the board rooms and offices and learning institutions of the great cities; and in the towns, villages, hamlets and farms and remote quite places where only distant train whistles pierce the night.

 There is an old expression handed down from generation to generation:  “To speak the name of the dead is to make him live again.” 

 By that measure, the great John W. Clapp will be among us a long, long while still.

 Greg Fieg