The 9:50 bell rang, and I exited biology class into a swarm of adolescent humanity. I worked my way through the crowd to my locker, bumping into a buddy here, talking to a teacher there. At my locker, I was surrounded by Austin High School’s most obnoxious...my friends. My locker seemed to be headquarters because we rarely accumulated around anybody else’s locker. Mine was centrally located to all areas of the school, so by default, it became our hangout between classes.
The class that followed was creative writing, Mr. Bode’s class. I spent my freshman and sophomore years with the Hernandez sisters, two larger-than-life English teachers whom I greatly appreciated and respected. No other teacher, English or otherwise, could top either Hernandez sister until I encountered what we fondly called “Bode’s class.” As I did every school day at 9:55, I left my friends early, and I scurried to Bode’s class to seize a front-row seat. My friends and I made it a custom to show up to any class at least one minute late, but Bode’s class was different. Something about Mr. Bode made even the most delinquent of students arrive on time.
Settling into my seat, others began to arrive, bolstering loud talk infused with every expletive imaginable, including many we had made up on the spot. Bode’s class possessed one peculiar characteristic: Mr. Bode attracted every thuggish, drugged-out, foul-mouthed ruffian Austin had to offer. All the freaks, punks, rockers, stoners, and hoodlums were in this class. I don’t know if this was the case yearly, but the last two certainly held that trait
Image caption: Elroy Bode. Courtesy of El Paso Times.
The 10:00 bell rang, but the monotonous clatter of Austin’s worst persisted. Several seconds into the 10:00 a.m. hour, Mr. Bode stepped in, as he did every day. He strolled into the classroom in his loose-fitting oatmeal khaki pants and blue plaid shirt. He wore geeky, oh-so ‘70s square glasses that, combined with his Groucho Marx mustache, gave him that Clark-Kent-meets-Inspector-Clouseau look. He walked to his desk, never turning to see his students, set his briefcase down, took a folder out of it, then stepped behind the dilapidated podium. Finally, his eyes gazed forward, scanning the rowdies in the class. I want to think of myself as the one angel in the classroom, but truth be told, I hung with a lot of these boneheads and partook probably in more mischievousness than most in the class, but in Bode’s class, something was different. I genuinely wanted to be at the front.
Mr. Bode plopped his right hand into a voluminous pant pocket and steadily jingled its contents. I never knew what was in his pocket, but I figured it was a bundle of change mingled with his house and car keys. Just a guess. It may have been a contraption he purposely made for these morning occasions. Anyway, he jingled his pocket’s contents, never uttering a word. Within milliseconds, the class hushed, settled down, and placed all eyeballs directly on Mr. Bode. This was the nature of every class meeting. Mr. Bode possessed a unique control, an essence that no other teacher in Austin had, complete command over the school’s most unruly students, and I sat in front of them, almost as their leader.
A creative writing class, Mr. Bode began every meeting by reading a short short story, flash fiction, a musing somewhere between 300 to 600 words, give or take. His hands firmly tucked in his pant pocket, ready to rattle whatever was in it, his voice maintained a piercing clarity that held each brute in the classroom captive; his tone, monotone…but not, if that makes any sense. And what made Mr. Bode “Mr. Bode” was his use of the words “he writes” interjected frequently between small passages, alluding to the writer of the story: “…and the sun broke through the oppressing clouds, fought its way through the bluebonnet fields, sending a message of hope that awaited the family as they traversed across the open expanse (he writes). Jim resolutely reached over to the glove box and clumsily pulled out the note (he writes) that would determine his family’s fate over the next few years (he writes).” Even just writing those words here catapult me into a trance. The class sat mesmerized. I will never know if we were mesmerized by the stories he read or by his interruptions with “he writes” throughout all his readings.
Fridays were reserved for reading each other’s works. At the beginning of the school year, Mr. Bode instructed us to pick a pen name and use it instead of our real name. The objective was for us to offer constructive criticism to classmates using our pen names and not knowing whose story it was we read. I had two names, to throw the rascals in my class off, The Amboy Duke and Sgt. Pepper. I thought they were clever names at the time, but looking back, hmmm.
I wrote a story called “The Foot,” about a guy who finds a foot on his walk home. He tries to find its owner but fails. He then decides to keep the foot, fix it and soup it up (he writes). He buys it fast toes and a slick heel and paints yellow and red flames on each side. After taking it for several spins and getting all the kinks worked out (he writes), he decides to race his foot. Down at the track, essentially a neighborhood street, all the revved-up feet let out an ominous roar. The guy arrives with his foot, unannounced, and challenges the fastest foot there to a burning-rubber race, cockily claiming his foot has no match. The winner keeps the loser’s foot (he writes). The race begins, and the two feet are side by side for most of the race. As the finish line draws near, the guy’s foot loses speed and drops back a bit. As the two feet reach the final stretch, the one in front (he writes) trips on a slightly raised sidewalk, causing it to hurl up into the air, falling bottom up. The guy’s foot, only an inch behind, stumbles on the same sidewalk rise and caroms into a tree by the side (he writes).
Remember, this is 1978, and my brain was heavily ensconced in too many other things to write a good story. But the kicker here is that I ran into Mr. Bode 30 years later. I figured he wouldn’t remember who I was, so I said, “Hi, Mr. Bode, how are you? I’m Tony Procell, one of your students of 30 years ago.”
He looked at me puzzled, then with that eye of certainty, “Yes, I remember you, the Amboy Duke. You wrote “The Foot.”
I have learned under some highly-gifted professors and worked alongside some highly-gifted professors, but none equal the connectedness and appeal that Mr. Bode exhibited. He was of grade A teaching stock and a fine, fine writer to boot.
Elroy Bode, born in 1931 in the Texas Hill Country town of Kerrville, served in the Air Force as a first lieutenant before coming to El Paso in 1958. He taught English and creative writing at Austin High School for 30 years and earnestly impacted his students, I one of them. The El Paso Times reports Myrla Garcia, a former student of Bode’s as saying, “He wasn’t just there to teach – he was there for you to thrive. He was a teacher who was just really passionate, and I think he opened our eyes to a world we physically just don’t see or read. He was a genuinely compassionate teacher.”
Bode authored ten books from 1973 to 2014, including Alone in the World Looking, To Be Alive, This Favored Place, and El Paso Days. He was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 1966, received two Southwest Book Awards from the Border Regional Library Association and was named the El Paso Independent School District’s teacher of the year for the 1977-78 school year, the very year me and my rowdies were in his class. “Elroy Bode was a legend among Texas writers, widely admired for the quality, honesty, and integrity of his work,” says Steve Davis, president of the Texas Institute of Letters. “Many of us looked up to him and see him as a benchmark for what the best of Texas literature is supposed to represent.”
After Ron Stallworth retired from police work, he turned to Bode to edit his 2014 book, Black Klansman, which was turned into a powerful, Academy Award-nominated, box office hit film by director Spike Lee. Macmillan’s 2018 reissue of the book became a New York Times best-seller In 2014, Bode published his final book, El Paso Days, and describes the book as “a journal of thoughts, scenes, happenings, sort of month by month: not a record of a specific year but a kind of recent generic year. El Paso Days is sort of equivalent to the wood-shavings gathered on the front porch as an old guy sits there, alone, whittling on his stick day after day, staring at the fading afternoon,” he writes.
Image caption: Cover of El Paso Days. Courtesy of Amazon.
The El Paso Times notes Bode’s wife Phoebe saying Bode “loved to walk around the city. He’d walk through Central El Paso neighborhoods like Sunset Heights and Austin Terrace and alongside canals in the Upper Valley. He always had a notepad with him and would write down his observations, often about the joys found in the simplicity of everyday life. He’d drive, and we’d get out and walk around, and he’d take notes of what he saw. He was just so humbled by being a speck in the universe, is how he would describe it. There’s so much around him, and he realized he was just a small part of it.” The El Paso Times explains that Bode once wrote in a single page of notes why he writes: “Writing is a writer’s way to stop the flow of time, the chaotic apparently meaninglessness of everything in life.”
On Sunday, September 10, 1917, Bode passed unexpectedly at his El Paso home. He was 86. “He was a beacon of light for El Paso as a literary center back in the days when not many people thought much of the literary scene here,” says Bobby Byrd, once co-publisher and vice president of Cinco Puntos Press. “He wrote about El Paso when others weren’t.”
“Words,” Elroy Bode says, “have carried the weight of my life; they are the bones of it.” The Amboy Duke will forever love you!! You changed the course of my life, I write!
