CHARLIE DEE'S WAR

“Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves,:  for they watch for your souls, as they that must give account, that they may do it with joy, and not with grief: for that is unprofitable for you.” (Hebrews 13:17)

No, Charlie Dee did not work for the United States government like Charlie Wilson, he worked as a math teacher at Canton High School in Canton, Massachusetts.  I don’t understand the way my brain works, but for some reason Mr. Dee is on my mind this week. Maybe it was watching some of the scenes from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” on  Monday night (AMC on Cable) that put Charlie Dee on my mind, although my high school days were fourteen plus years earlier than that.  Anyway, for some reason I’ve decided to write about Mr. Dee today.

Mr. Dee’s real name was Charles DePasquale.  I graduated from Canton High School in 1972 and at that time (if he was telling the truth) he was 39-years-old.  That would make him around 75 today if he is still living.  He was never known as Mr. DePasquale.  It was always Mr. Dee.  Mr. Dee was a very likable but very strange man.  He was very complicated and, looking back, I think he was full of contradictions.  He had a tremendous rapport with teenagers.  He really “got” teenagers and knew how to communicate with them.  There was something about Mr. Dee that you automatically liked him and wanted him to like you.  I had Mr. Dee for a Senior Math class called, “Trig and Topics in Algebra”.  This class was mainly for college bound kids who were good in the humanities but not so hot in Math.  Kids who were good in Math took Calculus in Senior year.  All of my own kids took Calculus, and in fact my daughter Amy did exceptionally well in Calculus.  I am terrible at math.  I do remember learning Sign, Co Sign, and Tangent  (or is is “sine”??) in Mr. Dee’s class, but I couldn’t tell you any more than that.  I guess that stuff is used in engineering, but I’ve never used it since I left high school.  In fact, I did not know what I was doing when I took his class anyway!  I think I got Bs and Cs but as I recall we had open book tests and stuff like that.  

At least two days a week we did absolutely no math at all.   Sometimes as much as four days a week we did no math at all.  Being in Mr. Dee’s class was like a high school Oprah, or better still Dr. Phil, for teenagers before there were such shows as Oprah or Dr. Phil.  We talked about “All in the Family”.  Mr. Dee loved that show.  We talked about crime in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood.  Mr. Dee lived right in the middle of a very bad neighborhood in Dorchester and he’d come in giving us blow by blow descriptions of things that happened in his neighborhood.  We talked about Boston Latin School.  Mr. Dee’s son was a student at Boston Latin and he was very proud of him.  We talked about Religion. Actually, we talked a lot about Religion.  Mr. Dee claimed to be a very religious Roman Catholic, although he freely admitted that many weekends he was so busy he just did not get to mass.  One of his favorite religious stories was about an experience he had while in the military service.  I guess he did what a lot of guys in the service are known to do to meet their sexual needs.  He then went to confession and confessed what he’d done to the priest.   The priest told Mr. Dee that he needed to repent and promise not to commit the sin again.

“Oh, I can’t promise that, “ he said.
“What do you mean?!  Why not?!” asked the priest.

“Because I’m gonna do it again!”  Mr. Dee said bluntly.

The priest burst right out of the confessional booth, and physically threw young Mr. Dee out of the confessional booth!

Even though I hate math, and even though in 1972 I thought Mr. Dee was very cool, TODAY as a 53-year-old it bothers me that he really didn’t do his job.  Maybe he should have been a teen counselor or something.  Maybe he SHOULD have had an “issues” show on radio or television.  He was a cool guy but I learned almost nothing in his class.  Several years after I graduated, Mr. Dee also became a part-time driving instructor.  I used to see him in an AMC Concord Driver-Ed car giving lessons around downtown Canton.  The last time I saw him was in July of 1980 at a funeral service.  The funeral was at an Assemblies of God church and featured a number of what we evangelicals call “testimonies”.  That’s ironic because I know Mr. Dee kind of resented born-again Christians, and yet it was at an evangelical Christian service that our paths last crossed.

I’m the detective type.  I’ve located a number of my former teachers by using search engines on the internet.  I’ve never been able to find anything about Charles DePasquale alias Charlie Dee.  I just felt like writing about him.  I wonder what ever became of him...