MRS. SCHWANTES

Mrs. Schwantes (Carol) was a teacher at Washington High School. I had her during my sophomore year. She taught various English courses. I can’t exactly recall which class I actually had her for. I barely passed it though. Perhaps that’s one reason for the faulty memory.

Mrs. Schwantes is the mother of fellow graduate Wyatt Wood. Thus she is the ex-wife of the former vice principal, Mr. Wood. When I was in high school, she was married to fellow teacher Ken Schwantes. See my entry on Mr. Wood for more details surrounding this.

I liked Mrs. Schwantes. She was always friendly to me. She was always smiling too. What more can you ask? For the life of me, I can’t even recall any of my fellow students from that class – with the exception of that one guy from the group home that everyone called “Ski.” See my entry on Mr. Wenner for a story on him. Of course I can’t even remember what Ski’s real name was either. If memory serves, I may have had several freshmen in that class.

Our class was very well behaved. It made for a pretty laid back teaching style. It was a semester course. I think I had her during the second semester.

In the final quarter, most of it was devoted to this giant term paper. The paper was on what we wanted to do as a profession. Schwantes had several thick books which had lengthy bits of information regarding virtually every profession available. I decided I wanted to be an airline pilot – seriously. But my dreams were crushed when I found out that you had to have 20/20 vision, unaided. Oh well. That didn’t stop me from daydreaming though. I grabbed that book everyday. I read it and reread it. It really sounded like something I wanted to do. Schwantes gave us weeks to do this paper. She often gave us the entire period to research and write it. I used that time to simply read that portion of the book, over and over again. So of course when the day came to turn the assignment in, I had nothing. Yes, I had done absolutely nothing in regards to that paper. Yet somehow I managed to squeak by with a D- for the semester. Woohoo! I passed!

That was the one and only time I had her for a teacher. To the best of my knowledge, we never spoke again. Although I do have a vague memory of her coming into the video store a few times. So I guess we did talk a few more times post high school.

At some point in the 1990’s (I think) she and Mr. Schwantes divorced. I believe she is retired today. I think she still lives in Two Rivers. I imagine she’s in her mid-60’s by now. It looks as if she’s into arts and crafts. She’s also heavily involved with her church – a church in which fellow graduates Elmer Mikeal and Jennifer Hansel also belong to.