Ahh, yes, Miss Moo. I wrote for the Chinook my last two years at West Seattle High School, and was editor my senior year, 1980-81.

I remember Miss Mootafes as intense, and us as unfocused. Our school was deeply and widely divided between the cliques during the third year of failing desegregation: The ASBers (Rob Moody and Cheryl Law) hung out in the student body office. The smokers huddled outside the east doors by the library. The black students, imported from Beacon Hill, claimed the patio between the cafeteria and shop buildings as their territory. The jocks competed against each other in the gymnasium. The new Laotian immigrants were sequestered wide-eyed in their room. The yearbook staff (Ginny Olsen, Kyle Rutherford) had their room on the first floor. Horizon kids hid out in their portable (Laura Penberthy, Jim Crawford, me too).

And we (with Michelle Byrd and others) on the journalism staff holed up in Miss Mootafes' second floor classroom, feeling superior. A fight between black and white students on the patio, and a second case of arson, this one to the bulletin board just outside our room, were not able to draw us out of our self-congratulation. When I saw the flames lick over the edge of the windows, the high panes of glass between the class and the central hall, I yelled for Miss Mootafes. For some strange reason, I didn't call her by "Miss Moo," or my usual "Miss Mootafes," but "Dorothy!"

Typing may have been the most useful thing I learned in high school, but we didn't even have typewriters in the journalism classroom. To compose my copy, I had to walk down two flights and to the far side of the assembly hall to use one in the business class.

For each monthly issue, Miss Mootafes gave me a ride to the graphics shop, which was located on the Queen Anne side of the Fremont Bridge. She drove with her seat slid all the way forward, hunching over the steering wheel, gripping with knuckles white.

We used Futura for headlines, Optima for body text. No one counts headlines anymore. (I am unable to forget: M and W are two characters wide, other capitals are one and a half, lower case letters and most numbers are all one wide, "flitj1" and most punctuation are only half a character wide. We'd consult charts to see how many characters of Futura 36 point will fit on a four column measure.)

The photo compositors printed to paper, which we waxed, twice making diamond lines, on the back. We sliced columns of text with number 11 Exacto blades, and laid out the pages over light tables on blue-gridded tabloid masters. If we found a typo, we ordered it typeset, and we cut out the correction and glued the tiny text over the error. A single word in an article would stand out crooked, but it was spelled right.

During a long evening of laying out the latest issue, Miss Mootafes would return from a convenience store with a cream cheese sandwich on sliced plain bagel for me. My folks never bought bagels or cream cheese. The sandwich held what I still think must have been an entire brick of cream cheese, hot and melting, messy and delicious. Newspaper layouts still recall that rich and creamy memory.

I remember Miss Mootafes as being more concerned with our being nice, that being journalists. Another student in the class turned in an unsolicited editorial about abortion, hysterical tone, poorly reasoned, hand-written in pencil, replete with misspellings. I flipped it back at him and told him to type it before I would even read it. He complained, and Miss Mootafes told me I should be nicer to people, so they would like me. I told her "I don't want to be liked. I would rather be feared."

I once dogged Vice-Principal Ikeda (if I remember the name right), following him the length of the front hallway from his office to the library. I pestered him about the fight on the patio, demanding to know if it were "racially" motivated. He ignored me after his third denial. I left him when he stepped outside, into a cloud of cigarette smoke to reprimand a student, lest I invade another clique's territory. Miss Mootafes told me that Ikeda complained to her about how unprofessionally I behaved.

I regret that I never followed up on the story. I wish I had gone out to the patio and asked the students myself what had happened. But this too was their territory. And I was rarely encouraged as a journalist.

Miss Mootafes did once assigned me to write a feature on a student who was a ballet dancer. I remember thinking how boring and silly. She said it would be "nice" and I did it anyway. I think that was the article which won an award for best student feature writing at the Washington State student chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, at their summer convention in 1980. I should dig through storage to find my clip file. I dread I might find the article was awful, though I dread something else more.

I don't remember Miss Mootafes teaching any journalism, per se (except the obsolete skill of counting headlines). I may have already known the basics from Mr. Hartinger at Madison Junior High and my work there on the Federalist. I wish that Miss Mootafes had challenged me on my hubristic behavior, following up with alternative, more effective and "nicer" ways of getting the information I needed. I hadn't learned the lesson that reporting was more important than my ego.

That hard lesson had to wait until the rude shock that was my freshman year of college. After high school, I took nine years, dropping out of college for three years in the middle, to get my degrees from the University of Washington. One -- by default rather than design -- was in journalism.

I didn't learn anything at the University either, except some humility. I discovered I wasn't as great a journalist as I had thought. My articles were finally compared to other students' who were more talented, more focused and more dedicated. My submissions to the school newspaper were edited by people other than myself. My articles were graded by teachers with higher standards that "nice."

Still, I consider whether I would like to see Miss Mootafes again or prefer to keep my memory of her intact. I want her to remember me proudly, but she might not remember me at all. Or worst, she may remember me accurately. I wasn't all that nice to her either. She may have been saddened by my arrogant, squandered potential. I know I am.

I have been doing other things for 17 years. Now that I am old enough to have earned a mid-life crisis, I am considering dusting off the journalism degree and trying my hand again at 5-W ledes, nut grafs and inverted pyramids. It's a new world of electronic copy, blogs and multimedia -- a far cry from counting headlines and Exacto blades.

That one thing I dread, though, is the possibility my heyday may have been that article on the ballet student which Miss Mootafes assigned.

Matthew Miller