Determined to begin making more frequent posts here, I was trying to figure out what I could write and my mind turned to alliteration. Monday. Memories. Memoir. Monday. Okay. A post about some memory for Monday! Easy. I have lots of memories. Okay, pick one. Hhmmmm. Okay there’s the one about…hmmmm. Or how about when…hmmmm.
Finally, my mind thought about Monday. Or should I say Mundy. Larry Mundy. Who is that you ask? Larry Mundy was an English teacher at my high school. He wasn’t ever my teacher except for a few days in freshman year when we had to undergo some kind of testing and I had to go to his class. He also did a week long lesson on speed reading techniques for all the freshmen and we all rotated into his class for a week. But he wasn’t really my teacher.
Mr. Mundy was tall. (But coming from someone that is only 5 feet, that’s not really a good description.) He had dark brown hair with bangs that always hung over his eyes and he spent a lot of time kind of flicking his neck to get the hair out of his face or brushing it aside with his hand so he could see through his glasses. He always wore a suit but that’s not saying a lot because in those days, every mail teacher at my high school wore a suit, with the exception of the P.E. teachers. Mr. Mundy had a mustache and I remember he smiled a lot and if memory serves, he was an all around easy going guy. I don’t remember anyone having negative things to say about him.
One of the things that stands out in my mind when I think of Larry Mundy is that while I was in high school, he was picked as a member of the federal Grand Jury. At first glance, this wasn’t a big deal to me or to most of the students at the school. However, Mr. Del Rio, my journalism teacher and advisor for the school newspaper, The Tribune, made us realize it was a big deal. He wanted us, the newspaper staff, to write about Mr. Mundy’s appointment and about the role and importance of the Grand Jury. Mr. Del Rio was a history/civics teacher when he wasn’t advising/teaching journalism, so the Grand Jury thing was a big deal to him. We ended up doing research on the Grand Jury and interviewing Mr. Mundy and several other teachers in the English and Social Studies Departments as well as the Principal about what it would mean to the school to have a teacher on call or the Grand Jury. In the end, we had a series of front page stories related to Mr. Mundy’s appointment.
I don’t remember that his status as a grand juror ever interfered with his teaching job, or at least in a way that was obvious to the student body. Mr. Mundy remained the same easy going guy with the long hair that he had to keep wrestling away from his eyes. It occurs to me that Mr. Mundy would be a really interesting person to interview now, decades later, about his duty and service as a grand juror. Rudy Del Rio was right. It was a big deal. I’m glad it happened because it taught me about the grand jury and the legal system and civic responsibility.