FTV: Don Aronson et al
Even if school wasn’t your favorite place to be growing up, I am going to lay odds that you have memories of at least one of your teachers. While attending school was always one of those things we were mandated to do before we were set free into ‘the real world’, there were always varying degrees of acceptance. On one side of the ledger, there were the, “I can’t wait to blow this pop stand” students and on the other side, the “I want to go to school forever’ types. The bell shaped curve of education placed the majority of the population somewhere between those two extremes. Love it or hate it, everyone I talk about school with has their own ‘memorable teacher’ story. Not all of these stories recount pleasant memories, but they do seem to have taught us something. As it goes in any other profession, teachers end up doing a lot of learning on the job. In doing so, we make our fair share of mistakes. Good teachers learn from their miscues and improve. If one doesn’t find more effective ways of reaching their students, then it is probably advisable one should find another line of work.
My public school education stretched from 1958 to my high school graduation in 1971. Undergraduate studies from 1971 to 1975 earned me the credentials necessary to begin teaching in Ontonagon in the fall of 1975. In my day, a permanent teaching certificate was earned if one accumulated 18 post-graduate credits and taught for a certain amount of time. I wasn’t happy about getting laid off for the 1979-80 school year, but that break in my public school service allowed me to finish the credits I needed to obtain a Masters of Arts in Geography. When the economic climate in Ontonagon improved with the founding of the shipyard, I returned to my old job in the fall of 1980 and remained here until my retirement in June of 2018.
If you are keeping score, I spent 59 of my 70 years ‘in school’. How many of us are lucky enough to say, “Including my two years as an inmate (okay, student), I spent 45 years in Junior High?” When I joined the district, the 1600 plus students enrolled in Ontonagon meant I taught five seventh grade Geography/Earth Science classes and a large study hall. As the school population decreased over the next four decades, I wound up teaching various combinations of classes in grades 6 through 9. My one year as the Elementary Reading teacher was an anomaly but still enjoyable. My contact with high school students was more limited – study hall (when we still had them), senior service project (my last five years) and radio lab (beginning in 1997 up through the present day). I found that teaching a variety of subjects over the years (including 6-7-8 Geography/Earth Science, Physical Science 9, English, Social Studies, History, and Phy Ed (the last four were all in 7th grade)) was more work, but actually kept me sane. I am not sure how other teachers deal with teaching a full schedule of the same class every day for years on end, but for me, it was more fun to have some variety. If the teacher gets bored, then there is a 100 percent chance that the students in their classes will also be bored, no matter how compelling the subject matter is. A colleague in the science department commented, “How on earth can you have everybody working on different things at the same time? That would drive me nuts.” There is a lyric to an old Doors song that sums it up for me: “Variety is the spice of life!”
During my student years, I had a lot of teachers who added something to my education (mostly positive but I would be lying to say there were no negative things that cropped up) . Out of all the educators who supplied me with the tools I needed to become an adult and a teacher, I am going to take a little time to praise one in particular. His name was Don Aronson, my sixth grade teacher at Whitman Elementary School in Marquette in 1964-65. Mr. Aronson moved back to his hometown of Escanaba in 1967 but he remained in the teaching game for 56 years. Anytime I would meet someone from Escanaba, I would ask if they knew him and the answer was always the same: “Oh yes, I know Don. He is just a wonderful person.” A meeting with the Treasurer of the Northern Great Lakes Synod (ELCA) in May of 2024 brought me news that was not totally unexpected but sad just the same. Hailing from Escanaba, she got my usual ‘do you know….’ line of questioning to which she replied, “Yes I did. I live near his sister but I am sorry to tell you he passed away in February of 2023.”
I made it a point to find a copy of Mr. Aronson’s obituary and was amazed how little I actually knew about his life. Yes, we can always remember the interactions we had with our favorite teachers, but those revolve around school. We tend to forget that teachers are people with lives – just like ‘real’ people. I always liked running into a student in a store and hearing, “Mr. Raisanen, what are YOU doing here?” “Ah . . . shopping,” was my usual reply. I found that Mr. Aronson also had a full life beyond the 56 years he spent as an educator.
Don Aronson was born in Escanaba in 1931 and according to his obituary, “With only brief interruptions, he lived his entire life in Escanaba. He was a beloved teacher and faithful church organist.” He graduated from Northern Michigan University in 1954 and began his first teaching job at Whitman Elementary School. It is a small wonder that I always thought he was a cornerstone of my old school. Whitman opened in 1953 (the year I was born) and he was a fixture there during all my early schooling. My older brother and sister both had him as a teacher and from K – 6th grade, he was always involved with school programs, especially if they included music. Back in those days, it was still okay for schools to hold lavish Christmas pageants that included each grade singing a few carols and the older kids performing in the Christmas Story.
When the Junior High band did a concert tour of the Marquette elementary schools in my eighth grade year, there was Mr. A at the back of the gym taking it all in. This took place in the spring of 1967 and I did not realize that it was to be his last year at Whitman.
I had known that he commuted to Escanaba to play the organ at Bethany Lutheran Church every weekend. Apparently a particularly bad blizzard drive back to Marquette during the winter of 1966-67 convinced him it was time to seek employment in his hometown. From 1967 to his retirement in 2010, Aronson spent the rest of his career teaching 6th, 5th and 4th graders in the same classroom he secured in 1967. One of his former 6th grade students embroidered a plaque for him that summed up what his career was all about: “A teacher affects eternity. No one can tell where his influence ends.”
When I had heard that he retired from classroom teaching in 2010, I sent him a card. In it I gave him the thumbnail sketch of my (up to then) 35 years teaching in Ontonagon. I reminded him that I still blamed him for planting the seed for my future career back in 1965. Mr. Aronson was passing back our standardized test booklets so we could see how we did. I do not remember the score on the cover, but he handed me the first science packet (he always gave out the top score first) and asked, “Are you planning on being a science teacher?” The natural reaction was, “Ah, no…no I am not.” I thought of that moment eight years later when I stopped in and told my new college advisor that I wanted to sign up for the teacher training program. This was at the beginning of my sophomore year in college and Mr. Machowski looked at me and said, “You should have done that last year!” I replied, “Well, I didn’t actually decide to go that way until just now, so what do I have to do?” With that point cleared up, we set up my next three years of classes that would eventually land me in Ontonagon in the fall of 1975.
There were other tidbits about his life I learned scanning his obituary. My brother had mentioned that he has Mr. A the year he returned from a two year stint in the Army. He had been stationed in San Francisco, CA and true to form, managed to be the church organist for Ebenezer Lutheran Church while he was in the service. Don had actually begun playing the organ in church at the age of 15. First, he played for the Swedish service and the children’s choir and a year later, he graduated to playing for all the services. Even when he had to miss some services after knee surgery, Don had made sure he recorded all the music for the Sundays he missed. If his church plate wasn’t full enough, he also accompanied the Senior Choir, played piano for the Youth Choir, directed the confirmation Bell Choir, kept church attendance records, taught confirmation classes and began an annual confirmation trip to Chicago. Did I mention he also trained and scheduled acolytes and the people who ran the church sound system for radio broadcasts. He reluctantly stepped away from his organist duties in 2019 after serving for an amazing 73 years.
When Don retired from teaching in 2010, he wasn’t done with school. He spent many hours back at his old school tutoring students. His students weren’t the only ones who noticed. Aronson was recognized as the UP Teacher of the Year, Outstanding Person in Education, and he received a Certificate of Special Recognition from the Escanaba City Council.
Did Mr. A find any time to perform community service? Of course he did! Beginning in 5th grade, he often mowed the lawn in Ludington Park. In high school, he served as a DJ on WDBC sitting behind a large glass window spinning records. People passing by on Ludington Street could watch him do his thing. I got into the DJ game at WOAS-FM in the late 1980s but didn’t find out that Mr. A and I had that in common until I read his obituary. Of course, we aren’t spinning records behind a window with people passing by. No, these days we send video and audio of our DJs at work all over the world via our website at www.woas-fm.org .
If there is one thing in my teaching career that I can trace directly back to Don Aronson, it would be his attitude toward his job. Mr. A never made us think of teaching as ‘work’. Don himself often said, “I believe that if children believe you are interested in them, they will learn regardless of the methods used. I am very strict, but we have lots of fun.” When I was hired in Ontonagon for the 1975-76 school year, I was given one set of marching orders. The administrators said, “We have had some discipline problems in the last couple of years. Teach your material as you like, but keep discipline at the top of your list of things to take care of every day.”
It didn’t help that I was a 21-year-old who looked like a sixteen year old with a mustache, but I took this very seriously. I resolved that I wouldn’t smile until Christmas, reasoning, “Okay kids, if I plan on being here again next year, this is how I am going to do it.” Yes, I overdid the ‘discipline’ part that year (a former study hall student gave me a chilling critic of my performance the next year when I had relaxed a bit – and he was totally right).
The rooms in the old three story high school building turned Jr High were big echo boxes. If you did not talk loud, kids in the corners couldn’t hear but everything the kids said came back to the front like a roar. By the second year, I figured out the way to get a class to listen to you is NOT to talk louder. One simply had to talk softer to get their attention (which had the added benefit of making the times when it was necessary to raise one’s voice more effective). Yep, as I remembered back, Mr. Aronson was not one to ever raise his voice and it took me a few years to learn that lesson.
Thank you Mr. Aronson – you were an inspiration to your students, family, and community. There is one other thing that he taught me. He held a weekly drawing in class and the 3 or 4 names drawn from a fishbowl got to go out to dinner with Mr. A. The Jet Grill on Front Street in was one of his favorite places to take students. When I began taking field trips my third year in Ontonagon, I was never afraid of taking my classes to public places. At first it was a little challenging to take more than a hundred students (two buses worth), but it was a great bonding experience. Spend a day on a bus with a group of students (or in Mr. A’s case, at dinner) and one can learn an awful lot about what makes them tick.
At every level of my education, I encountered teachers who gave me the tools to get along in life and (later) enjoy teaching. It isn’t work if you enjoy it. When I passed the twenty year mark, people would inquire when I thought I would retire. I would always say, “Oh, I only get to do this for another ten years. After that, I will see what happens,” and I kept saying it for twenty more years. It became a running gag at school: “Raisanen will never retire.” The day I turned in my paperwork to retire in June of 2018, both the superintendent and the business manager said, “Are you sure?” Yep, it was time. Why am I still volunteering at the school managing WOAS-FM? Like Mr. A showed us, “If you enjoy what you are doing, it really doesn’t work.”
To all the other teachers I had over the years, I will eventually follow up on this topic so no one feels slighted….and yes, I do tend to remember the good stuff more than the rest.
Top Piece Video: .38 Special with the title track from the movie Teachers