Tie o’ the Day comes to you from the pages of my 1980 Delta High School yearbook—interestingly enough, called The Triangle. Suzanne went off to see a play without me last night, and I must have been feeling lonely (not) and nostalgic (not) because I found myself leafing through old yearbooks. I’m so glad that’s what I did, because I found bigly treasure. It’s a yearbook message from my English teacher, Bill Ronnow, a non-Deltan who taught at DHS for only my Sophomore year before he gathered up his family and headed off to law school. Although he taught at DHS for only a short time, he made a bigly impression on me. You know how sometimes—and I mean very rarely—you meet someone and you just know that they “get” you? Mr. Ronnow and I simply understood each other from the get-go. He was of the hippie variety—always a plus for me. Our mutual respect for the infinite fun and complexity of sentences and the literature they created was a key element in both of our lives. I lived for words and ideas, as did he. And I liked his clothing choices, the snazziness of which this photo doesn’t really convey. He often wore dapper button-down sweater vests, and I began to follow in his sweater-vest footsteps as soon as I could arrange a trip to the University Mall in Orem. 👔 📖
The yearbook note he jotted to me is a fine example of how we bantered with each other daily. “You’re a gentleman and a scholar.” is a quote right out of the book, Catcher in the Rye, which we must have gabbed about together. The order to “Sling that mud, Ms. Hoddie.” is a reference to the times he had seen me hod-carrying “mud” and bricks on construction projects with my brother, Ron. The note makes me laugh for so many reasons, one of which is that if a current teacher wrote some of what it says to a student, that teacher likely would be canceled. 📚🗒