GlennHeisler

< Rest in peace, Glenn Heisler, my "Communications" teacher in High School, 1952-2017.
< When Parkview Education Centre was being designed, the teachers had a hand in creating their programs and spaces; Glenn's was the evolution of Industrial Arts: "Communications." I signed up, and my life changed utterly.
< He had built a lab - there were no rows of desks - with VCRs, all kinds of electronics, a darkroom and a complete print shop.
< Glenn was a big, handsome bear of a man with a short beard, dimples, and killer smile, and as a gay teen I was smitten at first sight. Somehow that salacious energy got transmuted into wanting to be the absolute best student.
< We wired up a circa 1930 telephone switchboard to a half dozen phones around the Communications and Construction lab and called each other. There was a PORTABLE videotabe recorder there - a crazy weird, reel-to-reel one the size of a suitcase with a big strap to go over your shoulder - but it was a PORTABLE TV recorder. No one had ever seen one before. We recorded and rebroadcast school events.
< We built a telephone that modulated a laser beam to send the signal across the room. In a highschool. In Bridgewater. In 1979.
< The print shop was replete: there was an ENORMOUS process camera - 4' x 5' originals, 18" x 24" film, a darkroom with double-doors and controlled water temperature taps for both camera film and press film developing; a light table for stripping, a plate burner, horrifyingly dangerous power guillotine, and bindery. I became the master of the 11 x 17 offset press, and we - I - printed all of the school's regular publications.
< There were lunchtimes when I took a photo of a school event, on film, ran down to the Communications Lab, developed the film, made a print, made a neg, stripped it, burned a plate, ran off a couple hundred prints on Kromekote stock, cut 'em down and had postcards of the event to hand out at afternoon classes.
< That summer, Glenn recommended me to the owners of Ye Olde Print Shoppe on main street in Bridgewater, and at sixteen years, I worked in the darkroom and ran my own offset press there eight hours a day (when I wasn't running the also horrifyingly dangerous Chandler platen press.)
< Glenn had also installed a reel-to-reel tape recorder and MONSTER soundsystem, and whenever I hear Blondie's _Heart Of Glass_, I think of walking in there with the whole room shaking to it.
< Glenn, it was in your lab that I first got printer's ink under my fingernails, and it's been there ever since. Thank you.