Searching for Mr. Matteson

A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY Searching For Mr. Matteson

TEXT BY WILLIAM HAFFORD ILLUSTRATIONS BY GARY BENNETT On a warm spring day in late April of 1942, Mr. Matteson shook my hand, said goodbye, and wished me "the very best of luck." For less than a full school year, he had been my sixth-grade teacher in the small farm community of St. David in southeastern Arizona. My father, a civil engineer, had completed work on a highway project, and we were moving away. I never went back to St. David, and I never saw Mr. Matteson again.

Now, 49 years later, on another warm spring day in late April, I am concluding a search for Mr. Matteson. Not a physical search, for I know that he is deceased. I have been searching for the essence of Mr. Matteson, for those elements of personality and character that etched him so firmly in my memory that he remains unchallenged as my all-time favorite teacher.

The nine-mile stretch of U.S. Route 80 between Benson and St. David is a road removed from the heavily beaten path: two lanes of asphalt with a stripe down the middle. Today, it is a road that takes me back to memories.

Shortly after I cross the bridge that spans the San Pedro River, St. David begins to materialize. A barn with fading paint, cattle munching grass in a pasture, a frame house set back in a grove of cottonwood trees. Quickly, I arrive at the precise center of town. On my right is a Mormon church, on my left "Grandma Goodman's Grocery," and up ahead the red brick schoolhouse I attended when Mr. Matteson was my teacher. The rest of the community consists of a few scattered houses. And that's it. That's St. David. But when I was 11, it was my Tom Sawyer town, one of the neatest places I ever lived. I pause for a moment in front of the church. Some of the bricks and beams of that building were put in place by my young hands nearly half a century ago when it was under construction. On Saturdays, the men and boys of St. David would turn out to donate labor. Even though my family did not belong to the church, I always went over with my pal, Joe Goodman, and we would push wheelbarrows, stack lumber, and do whatever was asked of us. At noon, the ladies of the community served a buffet luncheon that was light years beyond my wildest gastronomical dreams.

I turn right at the first side road and, just around the corner, locate the house I lived in. It has changed - modifications of some sort. But the artesian pond just beyond it is much as I remember it, except for the cottonwood with the big limb that hung over the pond. That tree is gone. I used to climb out onto it with my fishing pole and sit there in the warm sun, bathing a worm, waiting for a bluegill to gobble it up. I also hunted quail and doves in the mesquite grove behind the house. Frequently, I would spend my after-school hours helping my pal, Joe, with his chores. I had never lived in a rural setting, so I found milking cows, feeding pigs, and collecting eggs a lot of fun. Maybe I felt that way because I could quit whenever I wanted to. Joe couldn't.

I turn the car around and head back toward the school. Over the past few weeks, Mr. Matteson's relatives, and others who knew him, have given me his biographical data, but to make it all complete, I need to see the school again.

I park the car and step out. The building is single-story, red brick built in the early '30s. It is Saturday morning and very quiet. Not a single human being in the scene, not even a wandering dog, not even a breeze, The school seems exactly as it was on the day I left.

I locate the room, two windows to the right of the front entrance. That's the room where Mr. Matteson walked between the desks and offered his thoughts, encouragement, and ideas. Back then, I didn't know who the poet Carl Sandburg was, but today, I can tell you that Mr. Matteson bore a resemblance to the man. Tall and lanky, ruddy cheeks, white hair with a shock of it always falling across his forehead.

He was soft-spoken, gentle, and always friendly. Each time a student made a perfect score in spelling, he would reward that student with a nickel. If you made a perfect score for a month, Mr. Matteson would take you into the nearby community of Benson to see a movie. Usually there would be four or five of us in his old '31 Buick. As a kid, I never wondered where the money for tickets and refreshments came from. Today, I know he paid for them out of his modest salary.

We had a student in the sixth-grade class who had some type of mental/emotional problem. His behavior often went far beyond peculiar, and he was a frequent disruption to the class. In those days, because there were no formal provisions

A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY

For teaching the handicapped, I believe most schools would have excluded him.

But not Mr. Matteson. He treated this special child with extreme courtesy and extraordinary patience. I also have a recollection that no one in the class ever spoke unkindly to the boy or teased him in any way. Today, I realize that through Mr. Matteson's example, all of us in the class treated the boy just as our teacher treated him, as we would have treated a handicapped brother or sister.

On April Fools' Day, 1942, the class decided to play a prank on Mr. Matteson. On the pretext that a student had been hurt in the mesquite brush beyond the school yard, we lured Mr. Matteson into an ambush, threw a loop of rope over his shoulders, and tied him up (with his forbearance, I'm sure). We told him he was being kidnapped.

"Well," he said, "in that case, you'll need transportation, need provisions." In moments, the entire class was crammed into the old Buick headed for Goodman's grocery where he paid for soft drinks, hot dogs, buns, and marshmallows. The victim had become the ringleader, and the sixth grade was gone for the day, playing hooky.

We went to a swimming hole in the wide streambed of the San Pedro. Through the balmy spring day, we splashed and waded in the water, climbed trees, lay on the warm sand, and ate until we could hold no more. I recall that day as one of the most memorable of my young life.

L. Earl Matteson was born in Alamosa, Colorado, in 1888, and before he was a year old had traveled, in his mother's arms, to Mesa, Arizona, by train and stagecoach. His parents separated when he was very young, and his time was divided between them. His father was a well driller and freight hauler. His mother operated a millinery store. Before he was seven, young Earl was traveling with his father on a freight route across the desert from Phoenix to Florence. His school was the horse-drawn wagon; his father, the teacher.

When he wasn't studying, he ran barefoot through the desert with his dog, chasing rabbits and badgers, once treeing a wildcat. Relatives say that each time he returned to his mother's care in Phoenix, she would spend hours soaking his feet and removing calluses so he could wear shoes again.

In time his father moved to the San Pedro Valley where he drilled wells for the settlers. Earl was graduated from Benson High School in 1908 and immediately passed the teacher certification examination without attending a single college class.

In January of 1909, at the age of 17, he was hired to teach grades 1 through 8 at the Whitewater School just west of the Chiricahua Mountains. The next school year, he was assigned to the Apodaca School, a one-room adobe building located at an unpopulated crossroads about 20 miles north of Benson. Many of the students in these sparsely settled areas were poor, and it was in locations such as these that young Earl Matteson developed a lifetime habit of sharing with his students. He spent much of his salary buying books and supplies for them, shoes and coats for those who needed them.

In those early years, new Arizona towns popped up quickly; old towns (generally mining camps) faded. In this changing environment, teachers moved about. Mr. Matteson next taught in St. David, then Benson, and in 1913, at the age of 25, he became principal of the grammar school in Willcox.

In 1915 he married Elsie Curtis, daughter of a local rancher. She, too, was a teacher, and for the next 35 years they both taught in the small schools throughout Cochise County. Since many of the schools were "one teacher," they often worked in separate towns and returned to their home in St. David on weekends.

To supplement his teaching income, Earl Matteson sold automobiles and often had to teach the early settlers how to drive their new "contraptions." He worked extra hours in a mercantile store, served part-time as a well driller with his father, and started a large beekeeping and honey processing business that remained profitable for many years. In the 1920s, he formed a cooperative that eventually became the St. David Farm Bureau, where he served as an officer and handled administrative duties. During this period, he also frequently spent his summers studying at Arizona colleges and as far away as the University of California.

Stories of kindness and generosity span his entire career. In the early '20s, he was teaching in the mining community of Mascot in Arizona's Dos Cabezas Mountains. On the other side of the range was another mining camp, but there was no transportation to bring students to school. So Mr. Matteson, with his own money, went to Tucson and purchased an old nine-passenger touring car that he drove (mostly in low gear over mountain roads) to bring the children from Alma Mining Camp to school.

Later, at the Stewart School, he built a manual training shop in the woodshed and equipped it with tools he purchased himself. The Courtland School had no water. So, each day after classes, Mr. Matteson drove four miles to a windmill and hauled water for the students. In Bonita School, he found that most of the children had never been to a community of any size. So he started taking them (at his own expense) on field trips to Tucson where the students visited museums and art galleries, and toured the University of Arizona campus.

Mr. Matteson's last teaching position was in a school near Gila Bend where cotton was the primary crop, and his students were nearly all children of migrant cotton workers. He took these children, as he had so many before, to Phoenix on his personally funded cultural trips. After retirement, he and his wife taught mentally handicapped children in their home. He died in 1976 at the age of 89. His wife, Elsie, preceded him by three years. Their only child, Earl Jr., himself a retired teacher, today lives in Tempe.

I stand in front of the old school and have no trouble at all understanding why Mr. Matteson was my favorite teacher.

All who knew him speak of his sharp mind, his voracious appetite for books, and his skills in the classroom. But I am certain that it was the very obvious thread of kindness, woven through every facet of his character, that made him my all-time favorite teacher.

I have heard it said that an act of human kindness, no matter how small, forever changes the course of human history for the better. With so long a career, and with so many students, it is possible that this unassuming man, unnoticed by the public at large, wrought more changes than we might imagine.