The Galveston County Daily News

My teaching career at Blocker Junior High School in Texas City started on a stormy note.

One week after I started, Hurricane Carla blew into town. I often joke that I was paid a full month’s salary for teaching four days.

But it was a privilege to teach at Blocker under the principal, Joseph P. Lucas, whom everybody but his wife called “Joe Lucas.”

His wife?

She always calls him by his middle name, Preston.

During the ’60s and ’70s, Joe Lucas put together one of the finest faculties ever assembled — a faculty that blended the talents of veteran teachers like Edith Canant, a poet laureate of Texas, and Yuca Shafer, who stayed long enough to teach grandchildren of some of her first students, with teachers fresh out of college like Bryan Myers.

And Mr. Lucas and his assistant, Sam Sowers, supported that faculty. All of the teachers knew their subject matter and really cared about their students.

This was shown several years ago when a class holding a reunion invited their teachers from all grades to join them on a Saturday morning.

The largest contingent of teachers was from Blocker. It was a good reunion for us too.

Forty years later, I still have fond memories of my time on the faculty at Blocker, and although a number of them have died, I still count my fellow teachers from that faculty as my friends.