Mr. Q.

Mr. Q.

Noel Laflin

2-27-15

My old high school journalism teacher out-lived doctors’ predictions for post-war longevity by forty-seven years.  Family, friends, and colleagues, along with several thousand students were grateful for that medical miscalculation.  When I learned of Mr. Q’s extended days upon this earth, he was already at the half-way point – that was in the fall of 1968.  Doctors had cautioned him that he had perhaps six months to live following his release from a Japanese prisoner of war camp – that was in the fall of 1945.  Mr. Q. eventually gave into mortality in the spring of 1992.  He was one tough old guy.  He was also an outstanding instructor and journalism advisor. And he blatantly lied once – to a fellow Anaheim High School instructor - just to keep me out of trouble.

He was my favorite high school teacher – even after he had forgotten who I was.

But let’s back up a moment and let me give you a little journalistic background on Larry Quille, fondly referred to as Mr. Q.

You see, every first-year journalism student had an opportunity – nay, a final assignment – to interview the very man teaching that class.  He always insisted that this week-long group participation project, where we pretended to be cub reporters interviewing returning POW’s upon their return to US soil (as it had really happened to him so long ago) was his way of teaching the intricacies of both the interview process as well as the eventual written story itself.  And although this proved to be a pretty cool test for the last semester of our sophomore year, and one where we took copious notes in order to write a decent final paper, I think now that it may also have been a very therapeutic exercise on his part as well.

   

So, some of my recollections as a sixteen-year-old wannabe newspaper reporter participating in that interview and final paper are as follows:

 

Larry Quille graduated from Anaheim High School himself in 1930, showing a passion for journalism even back then.  He went into that field after graduation.

Over time, and seeking something entirely different, he set sail with the US Navy in 1941 working as a civilian payroll contractor on Wake Island – a place that I had never heard of until the spring of 1969, while participating in this give-and-take question-and-answer process.

We soon learned that the island was bombed and strafed by the Japanese starting on December 8, 1941 - in tandem with the Pearl Harbor surprise attack. The sailors and Marines (along with several hundred private civilians) brazenly held out for two weeks, despite being vastly outnumbered, before their inevitable final surrender to the new enemy.  As a class, we struggled with the images Mr. Q. painted of hot steamy tarmacs where survivors lay sunburned and parched, having no choice but to drink gasoline-tainted water, all the while festering in the unrelenting South Pacific heat. The men, stripped of all dignity and suffering from thirst and malnourishment - not to mention basic medical care - were eventually shipped to POW camps in both China and Japan.  Mr. Q. was among them.

Over the course of our week-long interview our class of sophomores learned of the horrors and atrocities of life in a POW camp as we probed deeper.  Mr. Q. never flinched while addressing questions of his captors’ cruelty, grueling death-marches, starvation, disease, and his disdain for anyone who might snitch on a fellow in trouble.  There were also stories of ingenuity on the part of comrades securing more food, friendships, sacrifices and plain old luck that kept many men, including him, alive for three-and-a-half harrowing years.  You could sense that Mr. Q. placed loyalty to friends pretty high upon his list.

But he was so ill and malnourished by the time of liberation that Navy doctors gave him but six months to live.  He said that he never accepted that diagnosis.

At the end of our five-day interview, there was silence across the classroom. We were out of time.  We were out of questions. The bell rang and Mr. Q. slipped quietly out the door. Our final paper regarding his ordeal – to be written in a news story format – was due at the end of the following week.

 

It was one of the toughest written assignments that I have ever tackled – but without doubt the most memorable, despite painful, to write.

At the start of the following school year, our class merged with the seniors as we produced a weekly paper and worked on the annual.  Mr. Q. set a serious, yet liberating tone in the classroom, allowing us to write and proceed with paper and yearbook layout in our own fashion.  He acted as the benevolent, yet stern publisher, quick to criticize as well as praise any given piece.  The man brought in bags of hard-boiled quail eggs (as he raised the critters by the dozens apparently) every week.  I still have images of ‘Quille’s Kids’- as all of those loyal to this gaunt, fatherly figure came to be known - brushing small multi-colored egg shells off of desks as we laid out paper outlines of a sports or feature section for the next edition – many held in place by salt shakers and red and blue editing pencils.

There was a separate old break room next door where some of us gravitated to in order to sneak a coke or smoke or to whisper in private.  Mr. Q. pretended not to notice – as long as the paper produced quality writing and the annual was moving along on schedule.

As the school’s reporters, we needed to be off campus at times, so Mr. Q. not only provided us with the precious hall pass, signed by him – allowing us to do so, if questioned – but also stressed just how he signed his name in case of an emergency.

 

Said emergency presented itself to me in my senior year when I was detained by a history teacher as he rightly suspected that I had skipped half a day to spend at the beach.  And although the swim was in no way school related, I presented a forged Quille pass as my ‘get-out-of-jail-free-card’.

The instructor knew that my crummy writing was a forgery and marched me off to Mr. Q. in quick order, so that he could prove his claim and punish me accordingly.  Fine particles of sand fell from my bleached-out hair as we trudged down the stairs to the first floor.  

Quille was alone in a hallway when I was unceremoniously shoved his way.  When presented with the crumpled pass bearing a bad likeness of his signature, and pompously asked by my captor as to whether or not it was his, Mr. Q. studied the paper, looked at me – sunburned with guilt – and calmly told Mr. Wilson, ‘Yes.’

Wilson sputtered with rage as he demanded to know why he would so obviously lie in order to save me.  He mentioned something about ‘Quille’s Kids’ and misplaced loyalty before finally storming off.

Mr. Q. looked at me with his sad, yet all-too-familiar hangdog expression, and quietly said, “You need to work on your penmanship. I suggest a little practice before you try this again.”

Two decades then flew by.  

One night my phone rang and an uncle of another former ‘Quille Kid’ - gave me the sad news that his niece had died – an old friend with whom I had recently been in touch. He had found my number scribbled on her desk and thought that I should be made aware of her death so that I could alert any friends who might want to know. And although I had not spoken to Mr. Quille in twenty years, I immediately felt I needed to let him know - as he had always shown Anita great kindness in the past.

I eventually found his number and dialed.  His wife answered.  I explained who I was and the circumstances of my call.  She was gracious and said that she would get her husband on the line in just a moment, but could I please be aware that he might be a bit confused at times and to not take it personally if he did not recognize me.

Mr. Q. and I then spoke for the first time in twenty years, his low gravelly voice sounding tired and far away.  He valiantly tried to place me – and for a moment, I think he had a glimmer of the kid on whom he did not snitch - but time and long-overdue ailments from a ghastly ordeal of a bygone era were finally playing havoc with both his thought process as well as his body. Anita’s name seemed to confuse him even a bit more.

At the end he thanked me for the visit and suggested that I call again perhaps…

We hung up before I had a chance to properly thank him for instilling in me a love for words and editing and layout design – a fondness for hard-boiled salted quail eggs - a better understanding of a horrific war in the Pacific and the sacrifices made by men like him.

And lastly, I just wanted to thank him for teaching me the value of loyalty and for a story that I need to share.

Lawrence Quille, AHS Class of 1930