I was a pretty good volleyball player in my twenties. I liked to tell my friends that one of my former teachers at Bowie Jr. High School was Smitty Duke, an Olympic volleyball player who had once been recognized by Sports Illustrated as one of the six-best volleyball players in the world. After giving my friends a moment to reel in their jaws, I went on to explain that Smitty Duke was my seventh grade Texas History teacher.
Even though Mr. Duke never gave me any personal instruction in volleyball, he did inspire me toward a lifelong love of the game. He would sometimes come out to work on his game during my P.E. class that year. You didn’t have to know a lot about the sport to realize that he had amazing talent. Somewhere, packed away with other treasures from my youth, is a magazine supplement (similar to Parade magazine) from the Dallas Times Herald Sunday edition. Smitty Duke’s picture was on the cover, diving for a volleyball, stretched out horizontally, only inches from the floor, his eyes laser-focused on the ball.
Mr. Duke brought that same focus to his Texas History class. He channeled my enduring appreciation for history in the roughly 180 hours I spent in his class. It became my favorite subject, long before it became a staple of modern television programming.
Perhaps the most important thing Mr. Duke ever did for me was to encourage me about something I had written as a homework assignment. I still have the original 3-page story, The Capture of Lesley Fame, with Mr. Duke’s notations. The encouragement wasn’t so much in the B+ grade I received, although I was happy with the grade. The encouragement came when Mr. Duke announced to the class what a good story I had written as he handed it back to me. The story was about a cattle rustling card shark named Lesley Fame. Many of the characters in my story were based on classmates and one special teacher. After “Dude Duke” captures Lesley Fame at the end of my story, Mr. Duke wrote a note at the bottom of the page about Lesley Fame: “People who cheat are always taking a chance.”
I suspect that many of the people who knew him best will share this simple philosophy from Mr. Duke in their public eulogies. I also suspect that there are hundreds of others just like me, who only had a single season with Smitty, but will continue to feel his impact for the rest of their lives.
Horace "Smitty" Duke
1942-2010
