COMMENTARY
Jeff Simon: Recalling teacher Albert Sutter
“Everyone has one.” That was the way I was going to begin this column—until, that is, I quickly realized that it’s not even remotely true. Most people, in fact, go through life without ever having one inspirational teacher who changes everything they are or ever will be.
One of mine—by far the most important one—died last week at the age of 94. His name was Albert R. Sutter, and to a few generations of us, he was an authentic legend at Nichols School.
Albert Sutter was my Spanish teacher for four years, but that doesn’t begin to cover his influence on my life. It is to him, more than any other single human being, that I owe my understanding of the life of the mind and the sustaining role of culture.
In those final two years of Spanish— especially that last year as a Nichols senior—he’d dash through the business of teaching us a foreign language (all those vocab tests, new idioms, language lab sessions and increasingly complex translations) and then lead us all in far-ranging discussions of music, art, literature and philosophy. We were, at the ages of 17 and 18, having daily free-form cultural seminars with a passionately intellectual man who had no interest whatsoever in affirming the blandness, mediocrity or social privilege that might well have been expected. By the time of that fourth and final year, there were only eight of us in the class, more than half of whom went on to Harvard, Yale and Princeton. (Not me. Money, self-discipline and grades were insurmountable issues.)
The ’60s were knocking at the door and about to blow it open. Albert R. Sutter was the sole authoritative adult voice I knew in what was, at the time, a very conservative school hinting at what was coming and the cultural immensity behind it.
Albert Sutter’s generations of students are now flung far and wide—many, no doubt, with similar feelings of gratitude, even awe. Because I remained in Buffalo and wrote for his local newspaper, I had the rare and wonderful luck to get an occasional precious “attaboy” e-mail from him every couple of years.
To fully understand how liberating he was, you have to understand how utterly terrifying he was for those first two years when his classes were full of the city’s sons of privilege who sat at their desks cowering in fear and seething with resentment at the imminent humiliation that was certain when Sutter —with unerring pedagogical instincts —called on those who were least prepared to falter in front of the class. (Nichols wasn’t yet coed, an eventuality that Sutter, on the faculty, advocated with rare staunchness.)
Imagine me, an undersized pubescent pipsqueak of 13, watching the toughest guy in school, the upper class-man who was the school’s fearsome and bruising hockey team “enforcer” (with the broken front tooth to prove it) as he quivered in dread at being called on by Albert R. Sutter.
And then took his public drubbing when his translation unpreparedness resulted in a thicket of error, stumbling and stuttering.
Not surprisingly, Albert R. Sutter’s class was where I first heard the then-unfamiliar word “machismo” and had it explained to me. Just as unsurprisingly, it was the first place in life where I realized just how hollow an idea it could be.
That such a once-terrifying man could, four years later, trust a couple of handfuls of students enough to play them, in class, his 78 rpm records of Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire” (which I still dislike) was an education of its own way beyond education.
And it was just what that extraordinary man did, one way or another, every day of his professional life.
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