"Cosmic" Kent Cathcart

Outside of the students that attended McGavock Comprehensive High School over the years, I suppose very few people have heard of "Cosmic" Kent Cathcart. I don't know who or when the tile was coined, but it was a fitting title. He was McGavock's Drama/English teacher from the early 1970's up until he retired in 1999. Of all the teachers that were fondly remembered by generations of alumni, he tops the list on the message boards for McGavock at classmates.com, and has a thread just for him. When I did my profile for my blog page and I listed my teachers, he was an essential inclusion. He deserves more mention than I could ever afford him. More than just a high school teacher, he was my, and numerous others', spiritual mentor in high school. He was a Drama teacher, but it wasn't so much the productions or drama coaching under his excellent direction that I remember, nor the English, literature, and sentence structures that he taught, but how he helped us to survive the high school drama and teenage traumas at a time when we were finding our identities on the brink of adulthood. It was the "mind trips" we went on, how his classroom was a refuge, quite often when we were supposed to be in another class (he would put us to work)- for me it was a refuge from the boredom of Commercial Art when Mr. Carney would be absent for most of the class period to nurse his ulcer with milk and rolls from the cafeteria, the individual attention he gave and made us all feel special and unique, the wise sage who gave profound advice, the way he would use reverse psychology to pull me out of my depressive, self-naughting pity party, covering me with a blanket as some sort of burial -ha! (it worked), how he lovingly prodded us to strive for excellence in everything we did, and his belief that we were all capable of so much more. He would bake us bread- it was symbolic of his spiritual guidance. He had a Gandhi-like patience and compassion, and was very gestalt in his method of guidance and teaching, and sometimes was as abrasive, paradoxical and blunt as a Zen master. His eyes smiled. Without a word, he could affect us with a soulful, fatherly gaze, and we knew what he was saying. He genuinely loved us, and we knew it. He didn't play favorites- he treated each one of us as his favorite.

Our school, up until my graduating year of 1986, was the largest high school in the Southeast, and many of our classes were 50+ students. It was easy to get lost among all of the students, to feel like just another number, invisible in such large classes, but he took the time to stop and notice each one of us, even those students who didn't take his classes that meandered past his door. His first comment to me, before he knew my name, was something like, "Patchouli...(with my sixties clothing- vintage paisley blouses with large collars and darts, mardi gras beads and my June Cleaver dresses and pill box purse) you are an anachronism of the '60's", gave me a heartfelt hug, and told me about the time he lived down the street from Sharon Tate in Southern California in the '60's. He allowed me to post quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self-reliance, on the small bulletin board as you walked in the door of the amphitheater styled drama classroom, in which everyone had their particular spot on the carpetted steps. He welcomed into his classroom, my high school sweetheart, Walt, on my 17^th birthday, who had brought me a birthday gift of a pair of vintage Ray-Ban sunglasses (with glass lenses!)- not the usual style, more of a Jackie'O style. "Hey Walt", and didn't ask whether he had permission to be there or not, whether he had ditched the day at the parochial school he attended. I was never much of an actor, and that really never improved, in spite of his expert coaching, but I learned a lot about life and myself as a spiritual being, about living outside the box. I had always felt like an odd-ball, never feeling like I fit in, but he made me feel accepted inside his class and outside of his class. "Cosmic" Kent Cathcart's teachings and guidance are hugely a part of me. It is important to remember and honor one's teachers, and he was so much more to me and others than I could ever express.