For the back-to-school season, we begin a Storytelling series today about favorite teachers:

"Spinsters" and "school marms" were the kinder ways to refer to the teachers some of us had a few generations ago. In more malevolent moments, we referred to them as "old maids."

Now I think of them differently.

Now I know that if they wanted a teaching career, marriage was out of the question. Stories floated around about boyfriends killed in the service, but if they had choices and lost loves, we'll never know. I hoped that they found respect, honor and a sense of community in the classrooms.

I can't imagine that we were up to their expectations, but I think they brought out our best. In the New Castle public schools I attended, these maiden ladies were our only teachers, from elementary through high school, aside from the male shop teachers in high school, who hovered in the basement. The women ruled.

Who could not snap to when Clara Hartsuff, the high school drama teacher with unforgettable flair, came into the room? Clara, who must have had a previous life on stage, was as small as a mouse, with gray-brown hair wound into a wiry bun. When she strode, in her sensible oxfords and straight mid-calf length skirt, into the auditorium for play rehearsals, arms flying, eyes sparkling, we, at the least, sat up straight, and at best, climbed on stage for a moment of fame.

Clara had a mother, tucked away at home, and after school, Clara could be seen, tooling around in her 1930s Buick, her head barely over the steering wheel, and her equally small mother perched like a queen in the back seat. When we spotted them, on our way to the drug store for our after-school cherry Coke, we doubled over with laughter. Clara Hartsuff was grief-stricken when her tiny mother died short of her 100th birthday.

There was Miss Spencer, who taught English. She, of the high cheek bones and sharp-nosed, chiseled countenance, gray knotted hair, long-sleeved dress buttoned up to the neck of her wiry body had a zero tolerance policy before it was thought of. She carved sentence diagrams into a permanent place in my brain, so that I can see the slanted lines to this day and hear the pointer tapping on the blackboard. "Adverb! Adjective! Prepositional phrase!"

They didn't look or dress alike or move in a group, Too feisty for that. Mary VanDiVort was small, so her desk was on a platform, giving her, with her lion's mane of unruly white hair and gruff voice, a regal command of her scholarly Latin class. It was assumed the student was there to learn, with daily recitations from each student in the old style. In the class before lunch, Mary wore her galoshes -- that set off the suppressed giggles -- so that she could stomp right over to the turret of a Victorian home across from the high school where she had a cozy apartment.

I visited her one time many years after graduation. The bookcases and shelves were lined with relics from her travels. It was time, she said, to begin to give these things away, and she gave my son a small wooden elephant from Africa. It was the only clue I had that she had been a world traveler, but not a name-dropper.

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Charlotte Taylor, my homeroom teacher in high school, is the one who got me thinking on this path. Her back was bent in pain and every step was an effort. The wrinkles above her eyebrows reflected the aches in her body -- at first impression she looked grumpy -- but when she smiled, the wrinkles dissolved.

After school one day, during my junior year, she did something that altered the direction of my life. She climbed into her little coupe and went downtown to my father's business, an auto parts store, a men-only sort of place.

She parked in the gravel parking lot, made her way in the back door and asked for my father. She introduced herself -- and told him that I should go to her alma mater, Oberlin College.

My father, who had only reached the eighth grade, had respect for teachers. He came home and told me what she had done. He thought we should follow through on it.

I did go to Oberlin, and it was a big breakthrough for me. If nothing else, I learned enough to write a few words about those grand dames. That is, "dames" in the regal sense of the word.