Thank your mentors while they are still around

Occasionally over the past 40 years, I tried to hunt down George Dendrinos, the man who taught my sixth grade class at School Street School in Boonton, New Jersey. After being promoted from his class in 1968, I stopped in to visit him once or twice when I was in high school, but my family had moved from Boonton in 1974, and while my fondness for the town remains, my connections dissipated.

I searched online for Mr. Dendrinos (I would never think of calling him “George”) occasionally once the internet arrived and web browsers became a thing. For some reason I thought he had lived in Garfield, New Jersey, so I tried searching there. By the time I reached out to my old middle school, he had retired and I was not able to locate him.

My goal was to email or call Mr. Dendrinos to let him know the outsized influence he had on me as a pupil in his class. I wanted to thank him for the patience, wisdom and energy he brought to his teaching. Sixth grade was a very long time ago, but his influence on my life and the lives of many of my classmates was profound and fondly remembered.

We too often take for granted that the people who have made a positive impact on our lives know how influential they have been. For many of us, these include teachers who were gifted enough in the classroom to convert restless 11-year-olds into patient learners.

I remember every teacher I have ever had. Mr. Dendrinos was the first to ignite in me a curiosity about stuff. Not just with the assigned classwork, but in the field trips into Manhattan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other museums. After one trip to the Met he brought in a copy of Charles Demuth’s painting “I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold” which Mr. Dendrinos had painted as a way of talking with some of us about geometric shapes, art, and taking on a good challenge. After school, he taught some of us to play chess and occasionally he would play four or five of us simultaneously. When I beat him for the first time, he studied the board, looked up sternly, and then broke into a wide grin. He prodded each of us and cheered us all on through our failures and our accomplishments.

“His patience and wit inspired so many of us,” my classmate and best friend Jim Lewis who now writes for “The Muppets” told me.

Mr. Dendrinos died in Pennsylvania, on February 16, at 91, in what his online obituary says was “a brief illness and a very well-lived life.”

I should have tried harder to find him. It strikes me that the right thing would have been to let him know that his inspiration as a teacher reached quite far and continues to resonate. I’m reminded that I should make the effort to thank those in my past and present for their gifts of guidance.

I never had the chance to tell Mr. Dendrinos just how much influence he had on the person I have become before he died. So now I am telling you.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin. 

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