The legacy of a great teacher

As the school year comes around again, your editor had cause to remember Mr. Kallstrom.  There is no first name to give – such was my respect that in my mind his first name was “Mister.”

Mr. Kallstrom was a high school teacher of economics, once retired and called back to teaching by his friend, my high school principal Gloria Moss.  I believe he was a widower and perhaps that had something to do with teaching again.

Kallstrom had lied about his age, saying he was eighteen when he was sixteen, in order to get into the Marine Corps in 1943.  There was a war on and young Kallstrom didn’t want to miss his chance to serve.

In a good economics class, we would get to hear a story of the occupation of Guam or the invasion of Okinawa recalled as if they were yesterday by the young-man-turned-old that was my economics teacher.

Kallstrom was loyal to the cause, however, and the fascinating military history always had a grain of economics in it.  He told of five-dollar butane hand warmers being worth $1,000 at the Frozen Chosin Reservoir, North Korea, when they might make the difference in bringing home your fingers – or not.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you supply-and-demand, explained in a fashion that even a distractable seventeen-year-old cannot miss.

Mr. Kallstrom told a wonderful story about buying his Ford pickup.  He withdrew the sticker price, $15,000, in cash from his bank.  He took that cash to every dealer in Dallas-Fort Worth and let them see it.  “Their eyes shone with hunger,” was how he described the commission-based salesmen of the day.  Every dealership beat the previous one’s price by a few hundred dollars, after which Kallstrom would put the cash back in his briefcase and proceed to the next dealership.

At the end of the weekend, so the story went, he gave $9,000 in cash to the last dealership, drove off with his desired truck and re-deposited $6,000 in his bank account Monday morning.  And thus old Mr. Kallstrom taught me the value of cash over financing when Dave Ramsey was still a pup.

Three years ago, when every talking head was saying that there would not be any inflation after the federal government paid people to stay home during Covid, I was skeptical, because Kallstrom made me memorize decades ago that “inflation is the result of too many dollars chasing too few goods and services,” which is exactly what paying people not to work was causing.

A year later, when inflation showed up “unexpectedly,” the talking heads called it “transitory.”  I remembered my definition and predicted otherwise, thanks to Mr. Kallstrom.

In college, my love for history and economics, learned in Mr. Kallstrom’s class and a couple of others like his, informed my course of study,

My point in this editorial is that great teachers can make a difference in an entire lifetime.  The world would be a better place with more Mr. Kallstroms.

Thank you for your extra effort and the difference you made in my life, Mr. Kallstrom.  Thank you for your extra effort, teachers like him that I do not know.