A Tribute to Mr. Phil Laesch

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Yesterday I looked at BCR Online and discovered that Phil Laesch died last week. He was my Latin teacher beginning in the fall of 1961, his first year at Princeton High School. I read his obituary, did the math, and discovered, to my astonishment, that he was only 26 years old that fall, and that he had only taught for four years. I got out my 1962 Tiger yearbook, and looked at the photo of the Latin Club. It was huge. What accounted for a hundred or so students in a small, rural high school, being enchanted with Latin, a difficult and dead language? Mr. Laesch.

We were enchanted by the man — by his sheer exuberance for teaching, for us, and for life in general. At age 26, he was a window to the outside world. He was a traveler, a musician, a renaissance man with attitude. When the Ides of March, 1962, came, the body of Julius Caesar, draped in a bloody sheet, appeared outside his little classroom on the second floor of the high school. The first Latin banquet was held that spring at the Methodist church. We ate dinner reclined on the floor in our togas, then watched “A Night To Remember,” the old black-and-white film about the sinking of the Titanic. This endless imagination and creativity as a teacher kept us all coming back to translate more of the War Commentaries of Caesar. Being around Mr. Laesch made us feel good about ourselves and excited about the life ahead of us.

His expectations were high, and I was not a good student, yet he always treated me positively, kindly and respectfully, and seemed to believe that I had all the potential in the world. I like to imagine the Master Teacher that he must have become, as the years went by and he got to teach German, the subject he loved most. I grew up on East Crown Street and I have a strong memory of him marching up and down the football field at dusk on summer evenings, playing his bagpipes. I imagined that he would be doing that every summer, forever.

In 1993, Mr. Laesch received a prestigious teaching award from the University of Iowa, for which he was nominated by my old Crown Street neighbor, Connie Small. By then I had graduated from the University of Illinois College of Law, and was in my second decade of  practicing law, (where at least I know how to pronounce Latin phrases properly!) The BCR article and photo about the award caused me to think about him, and I decided to get in touch, just to tell him what a wonderful teacher he was, and how important he had been to me. I saw him around town a couple of times, but I still haven’t written the letter. It would have gone something like this:

“Dear Mr. Laesch,

You lit up the world, for me and a lot of small-town kids. You were a born teacher, and you were a model of how to live and enjoy life. I’ve had many teachers in my life, many good, some outstanding, some internationally known. But you were simply the finest teacher I ever had. Thank you.

Holly Walter Jordan

PHS Class of 1965”

The point of this story is not only to salute the best teacher I ever had. It is also to remind all of us that the time to tell our people that we love them, that they are special and inspiring and that they make our lives better is today. I missed the opportunity to say those things to Mr. Laesch, but maybe he knew.

Holly W. Jordan

Mahomet