May 9, 2012--Mr. Ludwig

Until 6th grade I was a non-reader. That is, except for comic books. To them I was addicted. I pored over Batman, Captain Marvel, and ravenously Superman but not anything from the library or suggested by my teachers.

Still I did well in school, largely, I suspected at the time, because my mother taught 1st grade there--PS 244--and her colleagues either felt sorry for me or, more likely, because Mrs. Zwerling had such a pitiable son.

I was remembering this the other morning while watching Morning Joe. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was a guest, there to celebrate Teacher Appreciation Week. Joe Scarborough asked all five of the panelists if they had a favorite teacher in elementary school. Without pausing they each in turn recalled someone from 5th, 6th, or 7th grade who had a transformative impact on their lives. None got into the specifics but each recollection was fraught with obvious emotion.

As was mine as I thought back over my 6th grade year in Mr. Ludwig's class.

To this day I do not know why he singled me out for special attention. He was not a particular friend of my mother's. So it wasn't out of collegial empathy. Perhaps it was because I was tall for my age and he was the coach of the school's basketball team. Or perhaps, I like to believe, he saw some yet-unrevealed potential in me. Not just the fact that I was already more than six feet tall and thus destined to become the center of the Rugby Rockets, the eventual Brooklyn-borough championship basketball squad.

While getting me to practice my two-handed jump shot after school each afternoon, Mr. Ludwig subtly got me thinking about books. He perceived from my interest in super heroes an impulse toward a bolder life for myself beyond the limits and constraints of life in East Flatbush and the conventionalizing  agenda being pursued by my parents and extended family, all of whom wanted me to be a "good boy."

"I think you might like Two Years Before the Mast," he said after an especially successful workout--he knew I was feeling good about sinking two hook shots in an intrasquad game. "It's quite an exciting story."

When I didn't shrug off his suggestion, he said, "I'll see if the library has a copy." And two days later, after practice, as I was about to leave the gym, he surreptitiously slipped me a copy. When I got home and took it out of the manila envelop I discovered that it hadn't come from the library but that it was a new copy with an inscription--

In the hope that a young man will find adventure here.

Yours,
Burt Ludwig

I did not know what first to note--the young man, when I very much still considered myself a boy. Or the Burt, at a time when no one knew the first names of any of their teachers. Or, I suppose in retrospect, what he meant by Yours.


The book sat on my bedside table for more than a week buried beneath a stack of Supermans. Never once did Mr. Ludwig--Burt Ludwig--ask if I had begun to read it much less if I was enjoying it.

Then, perhaps more not to disappoint him than out of eagerness to read the book--even such an unexpected gift--I finally extracyed it from the pile and tentatively--with considerable nervousness began to read--

The fourteenth of August was the day fixed upon for the sailing of the brig Pilgrim on her voyage from Boston round Cape Horn to the western coast of North America. As she was to get under weigh early in the afternoon, I made my appearance on board at twelve o'clock, in full sea-rig, and with my chest, containing an outfit for a two or three years' voyage, which I had undertaken from a determination to cure, if possible, by an entire change of life, and by a long absence from books and study, a weakness of the eyes, which had obliged me to give up my pursuits, and which no medical aid seemed likely to cure.

Immediately I was drawn in. Not that I required a respite "from books and study"--obviously quite the opposite--but because I too was beginning to imagine myself spending a year or two, or even more, across a closer, more modest body of water--the East River that separated Brooklyn from Manhattan. A journey of my own that I was eager one day to experience and would be my version of encountering the exotic.

Indeed the book turned out to be a transporting adventure that ultimately helped shape my own life as it more ambitiously and famously had changed Richard Henry Dana's.

He wrote about his two years before the mast, working as a common crew member aboard the aptly-named Pilgrim as it left Boston, sailed down the coast of South America before swinging around Cape Horn during the Antarctic winter, a winter of vividly described storms and terrible beauty, including looming icebergs and the scurvy that ravaged fellow sailors.

When I finished, which did not take more than a very few days--I could not put it down--I brought it back to Mr. Ludwig in the same manila envelop. "Thanks for letting me borrow this," I said after class and before practice. "It's the first real book I ever read," I confessed, as if he did not already know that, "And I plan to go to the library to see if there are any more books by him."

"I'm sure there are," Mr. Ludwig said, tousling my hair, "Including one about a journey around the world. But this book is yours," he handed it back to me, "to keep."

"Really?"

"Yes. And I hope during a long lifetime it will be the first of many."

Which in fact it turned out to be. Especially after I moved to Manhattan.