Well, five or so years later, late one night or early one morning, I, along with some hellcats with whom I was roistering about, popped into the now-torn-down (and soon-to-be-a Starbucks) Bel Loc Diner for a hearty carb load. And there, perched on a stool at 2:30 in the yawning, draped around a tootsie who kept running her slinky fingers through his hair and chirping, "Oh,______, yer wonderful!" sat that teacher.
That was not the first time I found that someone for whom I had respect had feet of clay. Nor would it be the last.
For years I enjoyed the newspaper columns of Bob Greene, a Chicago guy who went for the human angle behind the glaring headlines. A typical Greene story was writing about an airline that allowed underserved children and their parents to board a jetliner at the airport, be served a dinner, and go on a pretend "flight" to somewhere without even taxiing down the runway. And he always wrote about how he made time in his schedule to take fledgling newspaper reporters in as interns and work with them on their writing.
This went on for many years, until it was revealed that for years, he had made it a practice to meet young women he was mentoring in the bar of a hotel, ply them with booze, and arrange to meet them upstairs in a room he had already taken. One of the young women came forward to his employers, and several others said "Me Too," and soon Greene, a married man with two children, was unemployed and disgraced. That was 2002, and he is still foundering. And he's 70, so we might assume that he has run pretty much permanently aground, but within sight of the success he once enjoyed.
And then of course, last autumn brought us the terrific investigative journalism of Ronan Farrow, turning over the rock under which dwelled Harvey Weinstein, and then all sorts of men came running out, accused of improper sexual advances or worse. Ben Affleck. Dustin Hoffman. James Toback. David Blaine. Mark Halperin. Kevin Spacey. Jeffrey Tambor. Al Franken. Garrison Keillor.
That last one hit me awfully hard. I know Keillor had his professional detractors, but I enjoyed his wheezy breezy stories and songs on the Prairie Home Companion radio show and his daily radio almanac and his books and newspaper columns. I did not know that he had trouble keeping his hands to himself, that he scribbled an obscene limerick on the whiteboard at the bookstore he owned, the subject of which verse was a young employee he found attractive, or that he made lechery a theme among his female employees.
As Keillor sputtered and demanded to be heard, those who found him to be a pervy creep were spelling out stories that found their way to the hometown paper that once had lionized Keillor's every move. The headline said it all for me: "For some who lived in it, Keillor's world wasn't funny."
It's been a tough fall and winter for me to see men I once respected fall into the soup of men who have been exposed as roués and despoilers of women. I choose the side of respect and honor for all decent people, and most certainly wish to have nothing further to do with the writing or acting or opinions of the men and dozens more listed above.
But I'm coming to realize that just like throwing out some old shoes or coffee mugs or worn yard tools, it doesn't hurt to get some new heroes every now and then. And I don't need old men as heroes when there's Emma González for all of us to exalt.
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