Editorial: Requiem for a coach and teacher
The written word is a simple thing. How much we take it for granted.
Consider this: You would not be reading this sentence if it were not for a teacher who taught you how to read it.
Think for a moment about the world that teacher opened up to you, what a breathtaking advance that skill brought to your life.
Think about all the other things teachers brought to your life, all the other things you learned because a teacher somewhere cared enough to challenge, to encourage, to demand, to nurture, to discipline. To teach.
"A teacher affects eternity," said historian and author Henry Brooks Adams, great grandson of our second president and grandson of our sixth. "He can never tell where his influence stops."
How much the truth of this resonated last week when services were held for Ron Cregier, a coach and teacher for 42 years at, among other places, Fremd, St. Viator and Schaumburg high schools.
His death in a car crash was, as most deaths are, grievously tragic. At 68, Cregier was only recently retired to his home in Hoffman Estates and devoting newfound time to his grandchildren and the rest of his family.
He was, as so many teachers are, a man given to humility.
When he was named two years ago to the Illinois Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame, he told Daily Herald prep sports columnist Marty Maciaszek, "My goal was to help kids both academically and athletically, and I was never in it for myself."
The lines were long at the services for him.
We've noticed over the years that this is the way funerals tend to be for teachers and coaches. They leave indelible marks. They touch so many lives. When they pass, it is a long cord that breaks.
Who among us doesn't remember a favorite teacher or two or more who affected us so intensely that we think back to them with sweet affection - even from a distant past?
"Most of us end up with no more than five or six people who remember us," the waggish "60 Minutes" commentator Andy Rooney said. "Teachers have thousands of people who remember them for the rest of their lives."
May Ron Cregier's family and friends take comfort in that.
And may other teachers, who so seldom receive all the overt gratitude they're due, take comfort in it, too.
We are, all of us, essentially the products of our learning. Thank you to our teachers, each and all of them.