Returning to a Place You’ve Never Been

August 26, 2025

When I was in the third grade, my teacher was a spinster schoolmarm who bore a striking resemblance to Mary See of See’s Candy. You know…white hair in a bun, glasses perched on the nose, a kind smile. Miss Church…I kid you not; that was her name… was a gentle soul who had the misfortune to be born with only one arm, her left arm. 

To anyone else, a missing limb might have been an insurmountable obstacle. Especially a grade school teacher. Not Miss Church.  She pledged allegiance with her left hand, taught cursive with her left hand, erased chalk boards and joined in dodge ball games…what we affectionately called “Bombardment” …with only her left hand. She did these things so effortlessly and so joyfully that you soon forgot something as important as an extremity was missing. 

Hell, I once saw Miss Church pick up the Sheriff’s mouthy son Raymond Crampton…who constantly tested her patience and disrupted class by meanly mimicking her one wing struggles…flip him in the air, and gently pin him to the cold linoleum, all with that one arm.

Think Mary See doing Bruce Lee.

I only mention Miss Church because of Alaska, our destination on this trip. Miss Church introduced me to the State when she asked each of us to prepare a report on a state and suggested we look at state flags to decide which.

 Growing up in a small town of 6000 just down the road from the Post and Kellogg cereal factories in Battle Creek, our home state Michigan was the safe choice.  The Michigan flag depicted two deer sparring on hind legs like kangaroos on either side of the State Seal. One might have been an elk. Maybe a moose. I’m not really sure.

Anyway, many of my classmates opted to go full-on Michigander and gamely colored the pugilistic big game by blending brown, sienna, sepia, burnt and raw umber. (It was early in the school year, so we had the full complement of 64 Crayolas that came with that big box with the built-in sharpener.)

 Some of my classmates, being animal lovers, ventured out of state. California with its Grizzly Bear or Wyoming with its bison were popular choices. Some of the boys opted for Oklahoma with its Indian war party shield.  I’m pretty sure that’s the one Raymond picked.

 Me?

Well…

I chose Alaska.

Why that flag? I’m not sure. I guess I liked its simplicity. No seals. No Latin mottos. No people. No moose. No elk. No words. What can I say? It was easy to draw and color.

You’ve got to remember Alaska was a new state at the time. It was admitted into the Union in 1959, just five years before Miss Church pinned Crampton to the linoleum. And the flag, I came to find out, was designed in 1927 when Alaska was still a territory, by a 13-year-old junior high kid named Benny Benson, an Alaska Native.  This is Benny.

Benny was a resilient kid. When he was 3 years old, he lost his mother to pneumonia, his house to a fire, and sadly his father, unable to care for his children, placed Benny, his brother and sister in an orphanage.   

Asked to explain his design, Benny said the blue was the same color as the State flower, the Forget-me-Not. The Big Dipper or Ursa Major represented strength and the North Star symbolized what would one day be the most northerly state in the Union.

 Pretty poetic for a 13-year-old orphan, don’t you think?

For many years Mom kept my Crayola knock-off of Benny’’s work. I don’t know what became of it. Might be in a scrapbook. I’ll have to ask my sister who herself followed in the proud profession of Miss Church, although I’m pretty sure Linda dealt with the Cramptons in her classroom more with Jedi mind tricks and less with juvenile delinquent jujitsu. 

Times change.

But some things don’t. Like a good teacher.

I owe a great deal to Miss Church.   Penmanship. Report writing. States. Stars. Entry level taekwondo.  But most of all she instilled in me a desire to learn more. 

Curiosity is a curious thing. Set in motion, it can’t be stopped. Miss Church didn’t just flip Raymond, she flipped one of her only five fingers and set in motion in thirty young minds a lifelong domino chain of questions and answers, each building on the other.  

Draw a flag and the next thing you know you’re reading The Call of the Wild. Read a little Jack London and the next thing you know you share your dad’s love of Robert Service. 

“There’s a race of men that don’t fit in, 
A race that can’t sit still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin, And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and rove the flood, 
And they climb the mountain’s crest; Their’s is the curse of the gypsy blood, 
And they don’t know how to rest.”

Hear enough Service at the dinner table and your nine year old eye can’t help but be drawn to the cover of April 9, 1965 Life Magazine with Bobby Kennedy atop a mountain in the Yukon named by the Canadians to honor his brother. 

Read about Bobby (the original, not that psuedo science nitwit nutcase who tarnishes his father’s good name) and you find yourself wanting to climb mountains on your own. Climb enough 14’ers and before you know it…well…

If you’re as fortunate as I am, you find yourself “returning” to a place you’ve never been except in your own childhood imagination.