The Hammock Papers: Fascinating.

13 June 2026

Fascinating.

Kurt remembers the heady days in Coach Stevens' history class ...

Roosevelt Junior High School was fortunate enough to have Bob Stevens as an 8th grade history teacher. Mr. Stevens would spend each history period walking between the desks of students bringing to life the history of this country. Hands behind his back he would walk and tell the stories of the country.

Occasionally, he would grab the chalk and draw out a battle scheme on the chalkboard, supplementing the drawing with gory and fascinating details.

Several friends and I even decided to bring our own history books into class to “check” Mr. Stevens on his facts. No way could he just roll these details out without at least some exaggeration.

Imagine an 8th grade class with at least four young students feverishly flipping through a stack of books as the teacher told the lesson from memory.

My family moved to Ohio from Michigan in 1977. On my first day of school at Roosevelt, I had the bright idea to wear a Michigan jersey to school. Coach Stevens noticed it within minutes. He picked me up (in my chair), carried me to his room, placed me in my chair atop his desk and proclaimed to his class, “Look what I found!”

Thirty years later, after a pretty drastic career change, I was blessed to spend time with him in his third-floor classroom as he mentored me through my student-teaching experience.

Through those Roosevelt years, Coach Stevens told amazing stories to engage his students, he maintained the highest standards to set an example for his students, and he carried himself in a way that I still remember today. I knew he believed in me and all his students. He was a model of what it was to be not just a good teacher, but a great man. His sincerity and authenticity were such that you didn't want to let him down. That responsibility was transformative to a young punk like me.

I’m beginning my twenty-second year as a teacher and there isn’t a day that goes by that doesn’t catch me feeling grateful that I was his student. What a fine teacher. What a great man.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

WALT WHITMAN

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds, It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL