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Last update: August 12, 2007

NEW! Heritage/Middlebury/Elkhart County photos on Flickr.

Thanks to a friend who has loaned me his slide/film scanner, I am in the process
of digitizing all my photos from my Indiana years. Because of space limitations
on this account, and in the hope of reaching former students, their parents, their
children, or their friends who might never trip over this little web site, I have
begun to upload my Heritage photos to Flickr. They can be viewed here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8005764@N03/sets/72157600318459737/

A Survivor's Memoir

by "Mr. Kube-McDowell"

It's never stopped being disconcerting to contemplate how much time has flown by. I came to Heritage straight from the Michigan State campus, and took my leave seven years later when the birth of my first child was imminent. The plan was that I would take a year's "paternity leave" to try my hand at writing and being daddy-at-home, and then we would see.

Within a month, I had a contract with Berkley for three science fiction novels. By the end of the year, I had an agent and, on the strength of the first of those manuscripts (Emprise), I had a future that lay along a different road. Though I still think of myself as a teacher, I haven't had a classroom to call my own since 1983.

Time. My eldest child is a grad student at Purdue University (studying aerospace engineering), and his younger sister is in middle school. The eighth graders of my first year at Heritage (the Class of 1981) are old enough to have children of their own in college. Even the youngest students I ever stood before at the demonstration table of Room 7 have had enough time to accumulate college diplomas, wedding albums, baby pictures, tragedies, triumphs, frustrations, and adult misgivings about the choices they made.

Time. Today's eighth graders, like my son, belong to the post-Apollo, post-Watergate, post-OPEC cellularNintendocableMTVpersonalcomputerInternet world--the first class of neoadults who will come of age in the 21st Century. All of the wonders of my growing years are unremarkably commonplace in theirs. All the wonders of their growing years pile one atop the other so swiftly that miracles seem to lose their magic luster, and we impatiently await fulfillment of our runaway expectations. It'll be interesting to see what they, and we, will make of Tomorrow.

Time. The last few of the teachers I worked beside are slipping into retirement. I'm not sure there is anyone left in the halls of Heritage who would know me.

But for the moment, I'm thinking of yesterday--of the rocketry club, burning peanuts, science fairs, leaf hikes, sectionals, fossil hunts, slide shows, faculty-student basketball games, the first Space Shuttle launch, four-square and euchere, MSU over Notre Dame in the '79 NCAA Tournament, sci-fi movie night, Life On Earth, King Phillip Came Over From Germany Soused, the not-quite-behind-the-scenes creation-evolution battle, the revolving doors in the music department and the counselor's office, flag football, belly dancers and lawn-tractor pulls at the summer festival, the school system's first computers, Cosmos, the faculty's first photocopier, looking for my students' names at the 4-H county fair, and most of all the joys of working with the "tweenagers" whose minds were hungry and whose horizons were expanding--and the frustrations of working with those whose minds were closed and whose ears were teacher-deaf.

In those days, at least, Middlebury was a community with short horizons, a one-stoplight town little removed from a 1950s movie or a 1930s Norman Rockwell magazine cover. Intensely tribal, determinedly traditional, classically rural, it rewarded conformity and unconsciously reflected the Amish/Mennonite subculture's suspicion of change and the wider world beyond. As a socially-liberal free-thinking and free-hugging agnostic humanist and scientific rationalist, I was a stranger in a strange land there, an amateur anthropologist on an extended survey of a largely alien culture. I found very few members of my tribe while I was there, and the culture shock was occasionally jarring--my graduating class alone at Michigan State outnumbered the population of Middlebury by four-to-one or better.

And it was puzzling and discouraging when I did encounter people who might have been friends but found that--being so tightly woven into such a stable community--they already had all the friends their lives could accommodate. In a real sense, my best friends in Middlebury were my best students, and I regret losing touch with so many of them when I moved back to Michigan in 1986 (and then let the unbroken ties weaken and unravel while I was distracted by the task of reinventing my life after a divorce). Without the chance meeting in the mall, the occasional visit to the faculty lunchroom, the inside pages of the local newspaper, the odd letter or phone call, and my work as a stringer for the biggest county daily, I lost my chance to learn what sort of life stories my students were writing for themselves.

What became of Judy Fuller, Valerie Eash, Laura Yoder, Melanie and Laura Schrock, Al Robinson, Greg LaRue, and the hundreds of others whose class schedules read KUBE-McDOWELL, SCIENCE, ROOM 7? Who escaped to a wider world, and who came back once they'd had a good look at it? Who went on to college, and what passions did they discover there? Who stayed on home ground, and who do they answer to on Monday mornings? Who married well, and who lusted unwisely? Who defied their parents, and who became their parents? Who took the road less traveled, and who took a wrong turn on the way to their dreams?

Such answers as I have or discover may become part of this remembrance, this memorial, this meeting-place--preferably in the words of the survivors and refugees themselves. The Internet has already brought me back in contact with a score of former students, and I hope and expect that there are more out there in cyberspace to be found. Perhaps not many more, but at least some--and until today's Heritage creates its own home online for yesterday's students, this page will be available as a stopover. I hope that the memories it brings back are good ones.

--first posted 1995; last updated August 2007

Survivors Heard From
(and why too many of you didn't hear back from me)

Robin Hood (Lee), '89
(Rhode Island)

Valerie Eash (Cox), '83
(Elkhart, IN)

Kathy Schueneman (Christensen), '84
(Switzerland)

Tom Hellinga, '84
(Bremen, IN)

Sheldon Wise, '84
(Tampa, FL)

Gregory Sevison, '81
(Elkhart, IN)

Rodger Yoder, '83

Patrick Weybright, '85

Michelle Petersheim (Briggs), '86
(Grand Ledge, MI)

Mike Ward, '81
(Georgia)

Gary Hile, '81
(Washington, DC)

Matt Forthofer, '89
(Clermont-Ferrand, France)

Kristin Puckett (Hall), '85

Kim Weaver (Christner), '83
(Middlebury, IN)

John Fowler, '86

Jeff Lemmon, '86

Amy von Gunten (Clemens), '87
(Maryland)

Andrew Straw, '87
(New Zealand)

Todd Baughman. '88
(Raleigh, NC)

Brian Keck, '88
(Greenville, SC)

Bruce Buller, '82
(Breckenridge, CO)

A. Dean Yoder, '81
(Denver, CO)

Eunice (Martin) Leide, '88

Mike Ingold, '86

Chris (Mondich) Miller, '87

Thomas L. Williams, '84
(New Albany, IN)

Tina Ann Tinch, '83
(Netherlands)

Monica Strawser (Malate),
'81 (Oak Park, IL)

Jennifer Cook, '88

Kristen Puckett (Hall), '85

Melanie Schrock, '85

Darin J. Yoder, '84
(Indianapolis, IN)

Melissa (Missy) Huber, '84
(Lansing, MI)

Jodi Bloss, '84
(Indianapolis, IN)

Jody Miller, '87
(Goshen, IN)

Joel Carlin, '87
(Charleston, SC)

Bruce Smucker, '86

James Galt, principal
(Indianapolis, IN)

Jeanne Kelley, guidance

Tony Hurst, science

Staff and Class Lists

Greg Estridge, '88
(dec. Jan 2002)

Ross C. Goebel, '88
(17 Aug 1970 - 09 May 1996)

Michael J. Tarr, '81
(28 Sep 1962 - 16 Oct 2003)

Eric "Bill" Vollman, '84

Wayne Yoder, '83

Dorothy McCammon
(1923 - 1997)