Dan Ruttan, a way far out cool man

                      BY JULIE WILLIAMS

                      DAN RUTTAN was my teacher in
                      the '70s when I was 11 and he was
                      the handsomest, grooviest teacher
                      we'd ever seen. He had a Jim
                      Croce mustache and Gordon
                      Lightfoot hair, and he didn't travel
                      to Switzerland or France like
                      Chappaqua ski families. Instead,
                      he bummed around Mexico. He
                      also had a wheezing old Saab he
                      called the ``slob.'' Even in fifth
                      grade we knew this was, as we
                      used to say, way far out cool.

                      I entered his class after experiencing five years of
                      driven, hyper-attentive female teachers. He broke
                      the mold and frequently blew my mind. Take the
                      issue of discipline: If you defied a teacher like Pat
                      Fritschler, my fourth-grade idol, you could count on a
                      forceful lecture or maybe a time out or, worst of all,
                      you knew she would be Disappointed in You.

                      One day in September, Mr. Ruttan instructed us to
                      finish a work sheet and put it in a certain basket.
                      ``Right here,'' he said, pointing. ``Do not ask me to
                      repeat these directions.'' A few minutes later, Megan
                      Chestnut hopped up. ``What do I do with my paper?''

                      He didn't yell. She was not sent back to her seat. As
                      I recall, Mr. Ruttan did not even look up. He just
                      said, in a voice like butter, ``Crumple it up in a little
                      box and when it comes winter pretend it is Kleenex.''

                      We thought it was the funniest thing we'd ever
                      heard.

                      Over the year, this irreverent, hilarious, big-hearted
                      teacher went on to fill our classroom with wild
                      inspiration: I remember a South American
                      marketplace from which we sold crafts to kids in the
                      lower grades; current-events group projects in which
                      we invented a scene and gave skits.

                      The one thing he couldn't create -- and he did try --
                      was harmony among us kids that year, a class of
                      which he once said, ``The only thing they do
                      together is fight.'' We were one of those classes you
                      stagger through with until June, at which point you're
                      happy to say goodbye.

                      I'm still sorry about that, because I know how he
                      cared. It was a year of sudden jangles and sparks, a
                      year of kids who had once gotten along and who
                      now collided, a year of a couple of kids with families
                      exploding, a year on the precipice before middle
                      school, when somehow we knew that life would
                      never quite be the same.

                      My mother, who still lives in Chappaqua, ran into
                      Dan Ruttan one day a few years ago. She related
                      how one of my old classmates had gone back one
                      day just to say thank you to him for not giving up on
                      her when so many other people had. Somehow I
                      never made it back, but that doesn't mean I, too,
                      don't owe him a basket of gratitude.

                      In my case, Mr. Ruttan worried that I was too serious
                      and too quick to rush out of childhood; he urged my
                      parents to guard my emerging creativity. Hey, he
                      said, you're only a kid once.

                      He was one of the very few teachers I had with the
                      guts to say such a thing out loud in that oh-so-driven
                      town, and he was dead right. I didn't see it so
                      quickly, but I live his wise words all the time.

                      Turns out I'm a teacher myself now, here in
                      California where you can still find lots of people with
                      handlebar whiskers and wheezing hip cars. I've lived
                      in San Francisco, driven across the country a couple
                      of times, hitched a summer through Alaska and
                      kayaked in Mexico. With a husband and kid now I've
                      slowed a bit, but I like to think that Mr. Ruttan would
                      be proud how I turned out.

                      Having spent nearly 14 years in high school
                      classrooms, I know that even the very best teachers
                      do not live celebrity lives; we tend our students
                      quietly, with patience and -- as Dan Ruttan always
                      showed me -- with humor.

                      When a teacher like Mr. Ruttan retires, I somehow
                      imagine that fireworks or brass bands are in order --
                      or maybe mariachis? But they can't capture the
                      lifelong melodies he nurtured in his classroom: my
                      love for writing, my sister Dar Williams' prolific
                      musicality, my renewed correspondence with my old
                      fifth-grade friend, novelist Anna Esaki-Smith, and
                      thousands of other lasting gifts in the hundreds of
                      students he's taught.

                      I can only imagine the adventures that lie ahead in
                      retirement. Whatever they are, I know one thing for
                      sure: They will be way far out cool.
 

                      Julie Williams lives in Palo Alto.