The Teacher Who Changed My Life by Nicholas Gage

Nicholas Gage was born in Greece in 1939 and immigrated to the United States ten years later.
In this essay, he writes about an inspirational teacher who paved the way for his career as a
writer. The essay first appeared in Parade magazine in 1989 and is adapted from Gages book of
the same year, A Place for Us, which focuses on his adjustment to life in the United States.
The person who set the course of my life in the new land entered as a young war refugee
who, in fact, nearly dragged me on to the path that would bring all the blessings Ive received
in America was a salty-tongued,no-nonsense schoolteacher named Marjorie Hurd. When I
entered her classroom in 1953, I had been to six schools in five years, starting in the Greek
village where I was born in 1939.
When I stepped off a ship in New York Harbor on a gray March day in 1949, I was an
undersized 9-year-old in short pants who had lost his mother and was coming to live with the
father he didnt know. My mother, Eleni Gatzoyiannis, had been imprisoned, tortured, and shot
by Communist guerrillas for sending me and three of my four sisters to freedom. She died so that
her children could go to their father in the United States.
The portly, bald, well-dressed man who met me and my sisters seemed a foreign,
authoritarian figure. I secretly resented him for not getting the whole family out of Greece early
enough to save my mother. Ultimately, I would grow to love him and appreciate how he dealt
with becoming a single parent at the age of 56, but at first our relationship was prickly, full of
hostility.
As Father drove us to our new home a tenement in Worcester, Mass. and pointed out
the huge brick building that would be our first school in America, I clutched my Greek
notebooks from the refugee camp, hoping that my few years of schooling would impress my
teachers in this cold, crowded country. They didnt.When my father led me and my 11-year-old
sister to Greendale Elementary School,the grim-faced Yankee principal put the two of us in a
class for the mentally retarded. There was no facility in those days for non-English-speaking
children.
By the time I met Marjorie Hurd four years later, I had learned English, been placed in a
normal, graded class, and had even been chosen for the college preparatory track in the
Worcester public school system. I was 13 years old when our father moved us yet again, and I

entered Chandler Junior High shortly after the beginning of the seventh grade. I found myself
surrounded by richer, smarter, and better-dressed classmates who looked askance at my strange
clothes and heavy accent. Shortly after I arrived, we were told to select a hobby to pursue during
club hour on Fridays. The idea of hobbies and clubs made no sense to my immigrant ears, but I
decided to follow the prettiest girl in my class the blue-eyed daughter of the local Lutheran
minister. She led me through the door marked Newspaper Club and into the presence of Miss
Hurd, the newspaper adviser and English teacher who would become my mentor and my muse.
A formidable, solidly built woman with salt-and-pepper hair, a steely eye, and a flat
Boston accent, Miss Hurd had no patience with layabouts. What are all you goof-offs doing
here? she bellowed at the would-be journalists. This is the Newspaper Club! Were going to
put out a newspaper. So if theres anybody in this room who doesnt like work, I suggest you go
across to the Glee Club5 now, because youre going to work your tails off here!
I was soon under Miss Hurds spell. She did indeed teach us to put out a newspaper,
skills I honed during my next 25 years as a journalist. Soon I asked the principal to transfer me to
her English class as well. There, she drilled us on grammar until I finally began to understand the
logic and structure of the English language. She assigned stories for us to read and discuss; not
tales of heroes, like the Greek myths I knew, but stories of underdogs poor people, even
immigrants, who seemed ordinary until a crisis drove them to do something extraordinary. She
also introduced us to the literary wealth of Greece giving me a new perspective on my warravaged, impoverished homeland. I began to be proud of my origins.
One day, after discussing how writers should write about what they know, she assigned
us to compose an essay from our own experience. Fixing me with a stern look, she added, Nick,
I want you to write about what happened to your family in Greece. I had been trying to put
those painful memories behind me and left the assignment until the last moment. Then, on a
warm spring afternoon, I sat in my room with a yellow pad and pencil and stared out the window
at the buds on the trees. I wrote that the coming of spring always reminded me of the last time I
said goodbye to my mother on a green and gold day in 1948.
I kept writing, one line after another, telling how the Communist guerrillas occupied our
village, took our home and food, how my mother started planning our escape when she learned

the children were to be sent to reeducation camps behind the Iron Curtain and how, at the last
moment, she couldnt escape with us because the guerrillas sent her with a group of women to
thresh wheat in a distant village. She promised she would try to get away on her own, she told
me to be brave and hung a silver cross around my neck, and then she kissed me. I watched the
line of women being led down into the ravine and up the other side, until they disappeared
around the bend my mother a tiny brown figure at the end who stopped for an instant to raise
her hand in one last farewell.
I wrote about our nighttime escape down the mountain, across the minefields and into the
lines of the Nationalist soldiers, who sent us to a refugee camp. It was there that we learned of
our mothers execution. I felt very lucky to have come to America, I concluded, but every year,
the coming of spring made me feel sad because it reminded me of the last time I saw my mother.
I handed in the essay, hoping never to see it again, but Miss Hurd had it published in the
school paper. This mortified me at first, until I saw that my classmates reacted with sympathy
and tact to my familys story. Without telling me, Miss Hurd also submitted the essay to a
contest sponsored by the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge, Pa., and it won a medal. The
Worcester paper wrote about the award and quoted my essay at length. My father, by then a
five-and-dime-store chef,6 as the paper described him, was ecstatic with pride, and the
Worcester Greek community celebrated the honor to one of its own.
For the first time I began to understand the power of the written word. A secret ambition
took root in me. One day, I vowed, I would go back to Greece, find out the details of my
mothers death and write about her life, so her grandchildren would know of her courage.
Perhaps I would even track down the men who killed her and write of their crimes. Fulfilling that
ambition would take me 30 years.
Meanwhile, I followed the literary path that Miss Hurd had so forcefully set me on. After
junior high, I became the editor of my school paper at Classical High School and got a part-time
job at the Worcester Telegram and Gazette. Although my father could only give me $50 and
encouragement toward a college education, I managed to finance four years at Boston University
with scholarships and part-time jobs in journalism. During my last year of college, an article I
wrote about a friend who had died in the Philippines the first person to lose his life working for

the Peace Corps led to my winning the Hearst Award for College Journalism. And the plaque
was given to me in the White House by President John F. Kennedy.
For a refugee who had never seen a motorized vehicle or indoor plumbing until he was 9,
this was an unimaginable honor. When the Worcester paper ran a picture of me standing next to
President Kennedy, my father rushed out to buy a new suit in order to properly receive the
congratulations of the Worcester Greeks. He clipped out the photograph, had it laminated in
plastic and carried it in his breast pocket for the rest of his life to show everyone he met. I found
the much-worn photo in his pocket on the day he died 20 years later.
In our isolated Greek village, my mother had bribed a cousin to teach her to read, for girls
were not supposed to attend school beyond a certain age. She had always dreamed of her
children receiving an education. She couldnt be there when I graduated from Boston University,
but the person who came with my father and shared our joy was my former teacher, Marjorie
Hurd. We celebrated not only my bachelors degree but also the scholarships that paid my way to
Columbias Graduate School of Journalism. There, I met the woman who wold eventually
become my wife. At our wedding and at the baptisms of our three children, Marjorie Hurd was
always there, dancing alongside the Greeks.
By then, she was Mrs. Rabidou, for she had married a widower when she was in her early
40s. That didnt distract her from her vocation of introducing young minds to English literature,
however. She taught for a total of 41 years and continually would make a project of some
balky student in whom she spied a spark of potential. Often these were students from the most
troubled homes, yet she would alternately bully and charm each one with her own special brand
of tough love until the spark caught fire. She retired in 1981 at the age of 62 but still avidly
follows the lives and careers of former students while overseeing her adult stepchildren and
driving her husband on camping trips to New Hampshire.
Miss Hurd was one of the first to call me on Dec. 10, 1987, when President Reagan, in
his television address after the summit meetings with Gorbachev, toldthe nation that Eleni
Gatzoyiannis dying cry, My children! had helped inspire him to seek an arms agreement for
all the children of the world.

I cant imagine a better monument for your mother, Miss Hurd said with an
uncharacteristic catch in her voice.
Although a bad hip makes it impossible for her to join in the Greek dancing, Marjorie
Hurd Rabidou is still an honored and enthusiastic guest at all family celebrations, including my
50th birthday picnic last summer, where the shish kebab was cooked on spits, clarinets and
bouzoukis11 wailed, and costumed dancers led the guests in a serpentine line around our
Colonial farmhouse, only 20 minutes from my first home in Worcester.
My sisters and I felt an aching void because my father was not there to lead the line,
balancing a glass of wine on his head while he danced, the way he did at every celebration
during his 92 years. But Miss Hurd was there, surveying the scene with quiet satisfaction.
Although my parents are gone, her presence was a consolation, because I owe her so much.
This is truly the land of opportunity, and I would have enjoyed its bounty even if I hadnt
walked into Miss Hurds classroom in 1953. But she was the one who directed my grief and pain
into writing, and if it werent for her, I wouldnt have become an investigative reporter and
foreign correspondent, recorded the story of my mothers life and death in Eleni and now my
fathers story in A Place for Us, which is also a testament to the country that took us in. She was
the catalyst that sent me into journalism and indirectly caused all the good things that came after.
But Miss Hurd would probably deny this emphatically.
A few years ago, I answered the telephone and heard my former teachers voice telling
me, in that wont-take-no-for-an-answer tone of hers, that she had decided I was to write and
deliver the eulogy at her funeral. I agreed (she didnt leave me any choice), but thats one
assignment I never want to do. I hope, Miss Hurd, that youll accept this remembrance instead.