Mr. Hewitt

By Larry Cohen  c. 2026

As my readers know and fully understand, I generally do not write about what we know to be the present moment, the era in which we now live.  I am not a news reporter.  To write in the present tends to lend itself to news, sports, and commentators thereof.  I’ll leave that realm to the professionals. However, there is something that, while not of this era, mixes both the past and past pluperfect into one topic, the topic of Mr. Hewitt, my 7th-grade science and home room spelling teacher.

Mr. Hewitt was an older gentleman, one might even call handsome, who was a Colgate University (Hamilton, NY) alumnus who probably needed a job. And, we needed a 7th-grade teacher.  Unlike the rest of our 7th-grade teachers, Mr. Hewitt seemed to follow a curriculum of his own making.

Allow me to explain.  On his way to school each day, Mr. Hewitt would pick up a copy of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.  The WSJ lay on his desk, but he would dig into the Times, leaving no page unturned nor unread.  There are few people whom I know that would find as much interest in columns about chess or bridge as well as the Op-Ed page of the newspaper as Mr. Hewitt did. He really read “all the news that’s fit to print”

Like all 7th-grade students everywhere, spelling was an integral part of our education. What was not a part of a normal routine was having the spelling teacher, in this case Mr.Hewitt, pull the words for us to learn directly from the New York Times front page. For example, we had to know the meaning and spelling of such words as “gargoyle” and “adamant.” The list went on and on, but all of the words were directly out of the New York Times.

But Mr. Hewitt was also, in a strange way, a prognosticator and amateur child psychologist. There was one kid in our home room who was a real troublemaker. I mean, very real. The rest of us knew that this kid was Coco-Puffs-Crazy, but none knew better than Mr. Hewitt.  The kid’s name was Jack M, which Jack later changed to Jake. One day, after Jack threw a T-square tool that he had stolen from our woodshop class across the classroom, Mr. Hewitt raised his voice and bellowed, “Someday, kid, you’re going to jail”.  Well, with the benefit of time and hindsight, something that Mr. Hewitt did not have, we now know that Jake M spent 25 years in the Big House for murdering a local bookie, amongst his other crimes.

Mr. Hewitt only stayed one year at the T.R. Roosevelt School, a school now completely gone, razed in order to make space for low-income housing.  The sad part is not that the school is gone, but that Mr. Hewitt did not live long enough to see Jack M. get sentenced to 25 years with no parole in Dannemora State Prison, now known as the Clinton Correctional Facility in Northern New York State.  Even sadder was that Mr. Hewitt was not there the day that Jake M was released at the prison gate, where and when Mr. Hewitt could have said, “Jack,I told you so”