Gerb taught us all

"You know how you get people to come, don’t you?”

I was sitting across from Bette Gerberding’s desk in her classroom at Brookings High School.

“I have thrown a few parties. I think I have the general idea.”

I am sure I was smirking. But this was a crisis meeting. Gerb wasn’t messing around. It was spring of my junior year at BHS and I had just been elected student body president — very much not to the delight of at least a segment of the faculty. Gerb wasn’t normally the student council advisor, either. But she and I were an unlikely team.

And in the true spirit of all first-time elected politicians, we were both realizing what a terrible spot the previous administration had left us in. The BHS Student Council was broke. Beyond broke, in fact. The Class of 1996, bless their hearts, had donned their black robes, walked across the stage at graduation and left us in the red.

And that just didn’t meet her standards. So she had a plan. We would sell homecoming buttons like they were Pearl Jam tickets. We would bring back the Bobcat fall formal dance. We would add yet another dance. And then I would make sure people came to said dances. This was a passion project for neither of us — but it wouldn’t do to leave it for the next person. We were committed, the two of us.

She stood up and walked out from behind her desk, light on her feet like the actor or dancer or beauty queen she surely always was, and said with a twinkle in her eye, “It’s still high school, after all. Find a way to get the pretty girls to come, and everyone else will follow.”

***
When I heard Gerb died on May 27 at a nursing home in Estelline, I tried to talk myself out of writing anything.

After all, there were hundreds — probably thousands — of former theater kids whose lives she touched at BHS, with Brookings Community Theatre, with Prairie Rep. And then I thought about what she would say about that excuse. And then I put my butt in the chair and started writing.

As her obituary ably reads: “Bette began her teaching career in rural South Dakota schools before joining the SDSU faculty. She later became the cornerstone of the arts program at Brookings High School, where she served as theater director and English teacher beginning in the early 1970s. Over the course of her career, she directed numerous productions and mentored countless students—many of whom carried forward her lessons in theatrical performance and public speaking.

"She was also deeply engaged in community arts organizations, including the Brookings Community Theatre, Prairie Repertory Theatre, and the Brookings Area Arts Council, where she also served in leadership roles.”

By the time I had Gerb for her famous sophomore year combination of speech and Shakespeare, it was the mid-1990s. And I had the blessing of having all of the stellar English department BHS offered in those days — Gerb, Pat Reger, Becky Ekeland, Sally Pies, Dave Walder, and others.

The truth is, this paper would not exist without Gerb — and certainly not just because she was one of our first subscribers. She, Reger and another instructor I had in college named Ilene Dawn Alexander were probably the only people in the world, outside my father, that I ever dared to say aloud: I want to be a writer. I want to make this my profession. I want to do it well, and I want that to be my life.

Like every other hockey player who went through her class, I did my informative speech on how to tape a hockey stick. I still remember her feedback after my presentation. The words were fine. But my delivery was something else. She wanted me to carry myself with more confidence.

She wanted me to remember that words, when spoken aloud, had the same properties as music — and needed to be delivered as such. “You wrote it well,” I can still hear her saying. “Now read it aloud. Listen. Write it again.”

She taught Shakespeare the same way. You simply were not allowed to be bored by the Bard in Gerb’s class. She stood in front of us — a true collection of flannel-clad, late Generation Xers, terminally suspicious of anything and everything — and with her cross-section of the Globe Theatre, turned those plays from dusty old pages into the riotous celebration they were always meant to be. She taught us about the drunken groundlings and the flying fruit and the young men in drag playing all the women’s parts. She made us read the plays out loud and showed us every last bawdy joke, giggling right along with us.

I’ll never forget her production of A Few Good Men when I was a freshman, and how she made Aaron Sorkin’s dense and lyrical script come alive on the stage of the Bell Auditorium. I still think it’s one of the best coaching efforts I have ever seen in Brookings.

Much to her dismay, I knew already by then I was a writer and not an actor. But that didn’t stop her from trying to recruit me for every play she produced while I went to school. She believed in her heart there was a role for everyone, that, as Robin Williams’ character told his students in Dead Poets Society, “The powerful play goes on. And you may contribute a verse.”

When I think back on Gerb now though, I want to echo most what was noted perfectly in her obituary, that she will forever be remembered “... as a devoted mentor who believed deeply in the transformative power of the arts. She encouraged young people to take risks, find their voice, and hold themselves to high standards.”

My first two English teachers at BHS were Reger and Gerb, and though they were two vastly different types of instructors, the one unspoken message that shined through both of them was this: There was power in words, but only inasmuch as you held yourself to the highest possible standards. Do the work, they both said in every moment, hold your chest out high and say the hard thing. Write it poorly so you can learn how to write it well. And when you know you’ve done your best then all that’s left is how you carry it. Do the work, and stand tall, they both called out with every note card and cue.

I can see Gerb in my mind now, in front of her sophomores. She carried herself like royalty. When it was her turn on stage, she commanded it.

And that never left her. She was a neighbor of my parents here in Brookings, and I would try to visit every so often. I hand delivered an invitation to our wedding, and the first four issues of this paper.

She always insisted I come in and visit for a little while. She had praise for The Beacon. And she had notes.

During one visit she had a big binder and was making revisions on a master’s thesis for one of her grandchildren. It was full of the same tight cursive notes in the margins I remembered from sophomore year. Standards, always.

Running the student council with her during my senior year was no different. When I won the race the spring before, my father, as he was wont to do, had simply tossed me a battered copy of Robert’s Rules of Order. “Don’t think Gerb is gonna let you get away with any shortcuts,” he said. And of course, she didn’t. We ran those meetings by the book — and a hundred times over the decades, as I covered some meeting or another for newspapers large and small, I thought how many towns truly needed a Mike Linehan and a Bette Gerberding, because some of those meetings had no standards at all.

Still, my favorite memory came at the end of the now-successfully concluded and returned Bobcat fall formal, in the waning days of 1996. It was just she and I in the main hallway outside the gym, counting our riches.

The room had been packed, and the BHS Student Council was well on its way back to financial solvency.

She told me there had been more than a little consternation in the teacher’s lounge when I won the election the spring before, but she was never worried. But then she asked… How did we get attendance for the dance to rise by such a margin?

I told her the honest truth. I made sure that any competing engagements for the evening — especially those that might have featured beverage service — weren’t going to start until after the last song played at Jostad Gym. Problem solved.

She hopped and spun on her toes like a ballerina and then smacked me across the shoulder with a stack of well-worn ones and fives, and then she laughed that worthy-of-Shakespeare laugh.

***

It’s entirely fitting that the celebration of Gerb’s life will be in the Bell Auditorium — it’s set for Saturday, June 27 at 12:30 p.m.

Family friends, and former students are welcome, and I can’t think of a better spot to honor her legacy.
I know there will be people there with countless better stories than these, and I know she would want them all shared.

But when I do go, I imagine I will think mostly about how lucky that place and time was to have Gerb, not the other way around. I know I will drift back to how she always carried herself — shoulders back and head high, and how she chose her words with such precision. How she used her own high standards as armor against the whole world. I’ll always think back to how that poise and grace made whole generations of often unsteady high school kids be able to imagine themselves not just on a stage inside Brookings High School, but anywhere in the world.

Linehan is the Beacon’s managing editor and welcomes story tips and comments at BrookingsBeacon@gmail.com