In the last days of research for the class history, I tried again to find out what happened to our biology teacher Guy T. Pinkard.  He came to Sea Cliff fresh, eager, and controversial.  You mgiht remember that the science lab had remained locked for most of the years before Pinkard's arrival.  He had been doing graduate work on fish at NYU and believed science could not be taught without experiment.  Suddenly the lab was open and we were mixing chemicals, tending mice and rats, and Steve Kalakoc got to smoke in the lab by running an experiment on nicotine or tobacco tar resideues.  

The difference between Pinkard and the aging and ailing Royal Potter emphasized a new vs old approach to education.  Potter did experiments in front of a classroom. Pinkard had the class do experiments under his supervision in the lab.  

He had a famous argument with a member of the class of '55 who knocked him down, the first student attack on a teacher we had witnessed.  Pinkard later apologized to us for the incident which began when he chewed out the student for cursing in front of girls.  (Not just for cursing, because Pinkard, despite his fresh approach to teaching was also a proper Southerner in his regard for women.) 

Pinkard would also visit the sick and wounded (students) in hospital, and he took 4 of us with him on a trip to Alabama for Easter 1955.  That story is in the class history.  I found his relatives in Alabama and I found 2 of the girls that he introduced us to in his hometown, Milltown, AL. 

Through these contacts I learned that Guy T had returned to Milltown in his later years and restored an old mill or house on a popular creek at Flat Rock.  He had never married, and the rumors all said he was gay.  He had no sooner finished his restoration than he died.

"That whole family was controversial," one of the local people told me.  One brother was a notorious wife beater and she eventually killed him.  Other brothers and sisters then took care of her children while she was in a mental hospital, and everyone of the children went to college, earned their degrees and are successful.   

Milltown had all but disappeared by the late 1970s when I went there to see the old general store run by Guy T's father.  But fortunately I have a picture that Nik Epanchin took when he, John Storojev, and Serge Yonov went to Milltown with him for Easter vacation. 

That visit changed a few lives.  Serge developed a crush on a girl named Deana Denny.  I fell madly in love (or what I then considered love) with my counterpart--the president of the Milltown high school biology club.  And our club secretary began a correspondence with a boy in Milltown whom she later married.  For my part, a passionate correspondence covered with Xs and Os convinced me to go to university half way between Alabama and New York.  By the time I had been accepted at Duke in my senior year, I had been rejected by my girlfriend who married a local boy.  But choosing Duke changed my life in many ways. 

My former girlfriend had three daughters before leaving her husband and taking back her name and going to nursing school in her 40s.  She is now still nursing part time and runs a 90 acre farm a mile from where we sat on her porch swing staring meaningfully into each other's eyes as we shelled the buckets of peas that her mother left to be sure our hands stayed out of trouble.