Published: November 1, 1999

To Catch A Thief

It would be oh-so-easy to slip into an unguarded school and lift a few frozen hamburgers from the bloated meat locker.

The first rumblings about the new superintendent in the Nebraska hamlet where I began teaching in 1968 did not come from the mostly rookie teaching staff. Unsure of what constituted proper superintendent behavior, we toiled for several months in a state of suspended disbelief. The students, quite naturally, sounded the initial alarm. They reported Superintendent Dwight blithely wheeling a busload of wide-eyed football players into the path of an oncoming semitrailer-said semi avoiding collision only by hitting a ditch and tearing up 10 rods...