Class Action
by Lynn Rosellini
Six heroes are made as they throw everything they’ve got into protecting their teacher.
Debbie Shultz is the kind of teacher students love. At Heritage High School in Conyers, Georgia, Mrs. Shultz makes studying Spanish fun. To help students learn vocabulary, she cajoles them with clever rhymes and sayings—“memory jogs,” she calls them. To brighten the trailer that houses her classroom, she spray-painted the walls vivid blue, fuchsia and yellow, and edged the ceiling with tiny white Christmas lights. After class, she always has time to listen when the teens bend her ear about problems with girlfriends or boyfriends or Mom and Dad.
If the popular Spanish teacher ever had problems of her own—an emotionally troubled husband, an impending divorce—her sunny demeanor hid them well.
At 9:25 one morning last December, Shultz, 46, looked up from her desk and froze. The class had just completed its Spanish II final exam, and she was about to take the papers to the office. Then she noticed her estranged husband, Ted, 51, a stocky man with brown curly hair and wire-rimmed glasses, standing in the doorway.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. Shultz had taken out a restraining order against Ted the previous week, telling police he had been stalking her. Since their separation, Ted had attempted suicide. He’d also tried to buy a shotgun at a nearby Wal-Mart.
Debbie Shultz and her salvadores.
Now her husband of seven years removed a 12-inch butcher knife that had been hidden under his jean jacket. As students looked up, uncomprehending, Ted lunged for his wife, the knife pointed at her chest.
“Go get help!” she screamed. “Dial 911!” She grabbed her husband’s right arm and pushed his knife hand toward the floor. But it was too late. The blade slashed deep into her thigh, laying open her jeans, cutting through muscle and severing a vein. But Shultz kept struggling. The next swipe of the knife landed a gash nearly three inches long across her thumb.
Austin Hutchinson, 16, jumped to his feet. Around him, students were screaming and running from the classroom. Hutchinson, a bear of a boy at six feet, 215 pounds, hesitated. Should I run? No—I can’t just leave her! Scott Wigington, 17, a starting lineman for the Heritage High Patriots, was on his feet too. Son of the county sheriff, Wigington thought: I’m gonna save her!
Debbie Shultz was losing her grip on her husband’s hand. Ted would have the weapon free any minute.
In a blur of motion, Wigington grabbed Ted’s right arm. Hutchinson took his left side.
Then Nimesh Patel, 17, a slender, bookish boy who prefers science to sports, leapt on Ted’s back, grabbing desperately at the man’s collar. Together the three boys pulled him off their teacher, flung him against the wall and wrestled him to the floor. Three more boys piled on.
But Ted, a muscular five feet, ten inches and 190 pounds, was not about to give up. Gripping the knife, he struggled to get free. With a sudden burst of strength, Wigington bent Ted’s arm back, and then pried his fingers from the knife. He flung it toward the door, where another student, Matt Battaglia, scooped it up.
“Mrs. Shultz, get out!” Wigington yelled. But the teacher, bleeding profusely, refused to leave her students. “Not until help gets here,” she gasped.
Within moments, Capt. Ray Girardin, the school ROTC instructor, barged through the door and jumped on the pile, followed by the school security officer. The police soon arrived and arrested Ted Shultz, charging him with aggravated assault and stalking.
“An hour later, it hit me what actually happened,” said Patel. Like the other boys, he said instinct and adrenaline took over in the classroom fight, and he felt no fear. “But afterward, I was shaking.”
The next day, with her leg and thumb stitched, Debbie Shultz stopped at school. Although she had to lean heavily on a friend to walk, she hugged and thanked every one of her students. “I wanted them to see me in the flesh, smiling,” she said.
Her husband, Shultz explained, had recently checked into a psychiatric hospital in nearby Atlanta. Unknown to her, after a week in its alcohol detox program, he had walked out. She said that if Ted arrived 40 minutes later—when her class ended—she would have been alone in the classroom. “I’d probably be dead now,” she said.
After the incident, the six boys—Hutchinson, Wigington, Patel and Battaglia, as well as John Bailey, Jr., 16, and Andy Anderson, 17—were honored by the governor and the Georgia house of representatives.
As for their teacher, Debbie Shultz, she’s back in the classroom, once again using her favorite “memory jogs” to drill vocabulary words. The Spanish verb for “to help” is ayudar. “Help, help, are you there (a-yu-dar)?” she recites rhetorically to her students. On a chilly morning last December, their answer was: Absolutely.
Originally published in the April 2004 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine.
Ted Shultz served six-and-a-half years in prison for aggravated assault, cruelty to children and possession of a weapon at school. He was released in 2010 and now lives in Georgia.
Friends for Life
by Ellen Sherman
Two men choose to embrace how alike they are instead of focusing on their differences.
The 77-year-old image is faded but familiar: 42 third-graders from Cincinnati’s North Avondale Elementary School. A small child in the third row stands out; John Leahr is the only black boy in the class.
“Almost everything was segregated then,” recalls Herb Heilbrun, an 84-year-old real estate broker, “so we didn’t play together. I wasn’t a racist, but I didn’t have black friends. I just thought that’s the way the world was supposed to be.”
Little did Herb imagine that he and John would be inextricably linked for the next three-quarters of a century—that one of them would be instrumental in saving the other, and that a lesson in friendship would be taught.
* * *
More than a decade after the class picture was snapped, World War II broke out. The two men went their separate ways, never really knowing each other. Herb became a bomber pilot assigned to B-17 Flying Fortresses, and John, also wanting to do his part for his country, joined the Tuskegee Experiment.
“I’d always had dreams of flying, but there was no place for black pilots,” John remembers. In response to a lawsuit brought by a student petitioning to fly, a program to train black pilots was started. “The military thought they’d show we couldn’t do it, and close it.” But the Tuskegee Airmen surprised everyone, flying cover for hundreds of missions. Still, it wouldn’t be until 1995, when HBO produced a film about the unit, that the world would hear of the brave exploits of these pilots.
Herb Heilbrun (above right) and John Leahr became friends 69 years after standing close together in their 1928 third-grade class photo.
The thrill of flying outweighed the disappointment John felt over the treatment he and his fellow airmen received. “On our first day of training at Moton Field in Tuskegee,” he remembers, “our officer said, ‘You boys came down here to fly airplanes, not to change social policy. If anybody gives you a hard time off base, you’re on your own. The Army isn’t going to protect you; your life is in your hands.’ ” White men in training to serve their country wouldn’t be greeted so callously, John thought. “It was like he was saying, ‘This is the South, and you’re still black men. Your lives don’t matter to anyone.’ ”
* * *
During the war, Herb flew 35 combat missions over Europe. “Once, in December 1944, I was flying over Czechoslovakia,” he recalls. “Eight hundred and fifty flak guns were aimed at us, and I was hit 89 times. But I made it home because I had great cover from our planes.”
Those planes were piloted by black airmen. “Though the bases were segregated, we’d meet in the sky,” John says. In more than 200 escort missions, only about five bombers were lost to enemy fighters.
* * *
After the war, Herb returned to Cincinnati, married and started a family. He rarely thought about his time in battle. But o
ne cold day in 1997, he read in the newspaper that his town was honoring the Tuskegee Airmen. “I just wanted to give them a big hug for keeping those German fighter planes away from me,” Herb explains.
He headed over to the reception and began asking the men who’d gathered whether any of them might have flown at the same time he did. They pointed to a distinguished-looking man in the corner. It was John Leahr.
Leahr (in 1945) in his military uniform.
Heilbrun posed next to his WWII B-17 bomber after flying his 35th mission in April 1945.
“This lanky, white fellow comes up and puts his arms around me,” John recalls. “I didn’t know what was going on.” But after comparing mission books, John learned that he had actually flown cover for Herb on two missions in 1944. In fact, John’s plane was among those that helped Herb make it home on that frightening December day.
“These guys were fighters, but they were told not to be aces—just protect the bombers at all costs,” Herb says. “And they did. It was amazing to be able to thank him.”
As John and Herb talked, they realized they’d worked at the same aeronautics plant before the war and at the same Air Force base after. John had gone on to become a stockbroker, but the two men had lived only minutes apart—a few miles from where they attended elementary school.
Herb went home after the reception and began looking for his old class photos. “I got out my third-grade picture, called John up and said, ‘If this little black guy in the third row is you, then this is getting really scary.’ ” Indeed, it was John, standing almost shoulder to shoulder with Herb.
“I couldn’t go through life hating people just because of the color of their skin. I couldn’t not forgive.”
The men began spending time together. Herb learned about John’s homecoming after the war—so different from his own. While parades were given for white servicemen, John and his fellow airmen went uncelebrated. Sometimes they were even targets for scorn. Once, in Memphis with three fellow officers, John suffered a beating. “A guy came along,” John remembers, “and said, ‘I’ve killed niggers before, but I’ve never killed no nigger officers.’ Two white policemen came up and just drove on. Luckily a sailor passed by and stopped the guy. If it wasn’t for him, I’d be dead.”
“If I had gotten killed,” John told Herb, “not a thing would have been said. They would have just sent my body home. It was a terrible thought to have about the country that you’d been willing to die for.”
But to counter any resentment he might feel toward whites after the war, John joined a multiracial church. “I couldn’t go through life hating people just because of the color of their skin,” he says. “I couldn’t not forgive.” And through his wife, a teacher, he began giving talks at schools about his war-time experiences and the importance of overcoming prejudice.
John invited Herb to come to one of his talks. “I knew people faced racism,” Herb admits, “but it never hit home until I heard John speak. And I felt a certain complicity. I hadn’t done anything to make it worse, but I hadn’t done anything to make it better.”
When John asked Herb to join him at the lectern, Herb saw it as a way to make good on a debt he owed to his new friend—and to hundreds like him, who’d been unsung heroes of the war.
“The kids are fascinated hearing John talk,” Herb explains. “Then he introduces me. We give each other a hug. When we show them the picture of our class, they cheer.”
In the fall of 2003, the pair received the Harvard Foundation medal for encouraging racial diversity. “Having Herb tell people how grateful and proud he is of us makes me realize I could have had this relationship for 77 years, not just eight,” says John. “Because of racism, he stayed in his world and I stayed in mine. We don’t want that to happen to two other little boys.”
“Adlai Stevenson once praised Eleanor Roosevelt because she’d rather ‘light a candle than curse the darkness, and her glow has warmed the world,’ ” says Herb. “Johnny and I aren’t about to warm the world, but I think our story has certainly lit a few candles.”
Originally published in the March 2005 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine.
John Leahr died at the age of 94 in March 2015. Herb Heilbrun celebrated his 99th birthday in October 2019 in Cincinnati, where he still lives. In 2017, he marked his 97th birthday by taking a spin in a restored B-17 bomber that took off from Lunken Field at the Cincinnati Municipal Airport.
Humor Hall of Fame
Cartoon by Robert Erskine
“I told you the tank was half empty, but oh no, you said it was half full.”
After finishing our Chinese food, my husband and I cracked open our fortune cookies. Mine read, “Be quiet for a little while.” His read, “Talk while you have a chance.”
—CAROL BURKS PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND
At dinner, my six-year-old niece told her father, “Dad, when I grow up, I’m gonna marry you.” I laughed until her mom said to her, “Don’t make the same mistake I did.”
—ISAIAH INMAN, RD READER
The Prisoner and the Encyclopedia Editor
by Daniel A. Gross, from newyorker.com
When an encyclopedia misprint brings two book lovers together, the only thing that stands between them is the bars of a Maryland prison.
One day in mid-2016, Robin Woods drove seven hours from his home in Maryland to visit a man named Mark Stevens in Amherst, Massachusetts. The two had corresponded for years, and they’d spoken on the phone dozens of times. But they had never met in person. Woods, who is bald and broad shouldered, parked his car and walked along a tree-lined street to Stevens’s house. He seemed nervous and excited as he knocked on the door. A wiry man with white hair and glasses opened it.
Within a few minutes, Woods, 54, and Stevens, 66, were sitting in the living room, talking about books. The conversation seemed both apt and improbable: When Woods had first written to Stevens, in 2004, he was serving a 16-year prison sentence in Jessup, Maryland, for breaking and entering.
And yet it was a book that had brought them together.
At Jessup, Woods had bought and begun reading Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia, a nearly five-pound tome that starts with an entry on the German city of Aachen and ends with zymogen, an inactive protein precursor to enzymes. He hoped to read all its alphabetical entries, which exceeded 25,000, and he spent hours flipping through the pages. One day, he was puzzled to read an entry stating that the 11th-century ruler Toghrïl Beg had entered Baghdad in 1955. He quickly realized that it should have been 1055. “I read it several times to make sure,” he says. Then he turned to the masthead, which listed the editor, Mark A. Stevens.
“Dear Mr. Stevens,” Woods wrote in a letter. “I am writing to you at this time to advise you of a misprint in your FINE!! Collegiate Encyclopedia.” He described the error and offered his thanks for Merriam-Webster’s reference books. “I would be lost without them,” he wrote, unsure whether he’d ever get a response.
What Woods didn’t mention in his first letter to Stevens was that the encyclopedia represented the culmination of his self-education. Woods grew up in a housing project in Cumberland, Maryland. Cumberland was once an industrial center but has become one of the poorest metropolitan areas in America. Woods was first sent to prison at 23, for firing his grandfather’s rifle through an apartment window after a drug-related dispute. He was young, embittered, and almost completely illiterate. “I had never read a book in my life,” he says.
Woods remembers enjoying first grade, but he says he was bullied because of his light skin. (Woods was raised by his mother, who was African American. His father was of mixed race.) In second grade, he developed an antagonistic relationship with his teacher, who made him sit in a coat closet whenever he annoyed her. Eventually, the school transferred him to a special education program. As he progressed through the grades, instead of learning to read and write, he was given chores such as collecting attendance slips and stacking milk in the cafeteria refrigerator. These ta
sks earned him mostly A’s and B’s. “Of course, I didn’t learn nothing,” he says. “They say it takes a community to raise a child. It takes one to destroy a child too.” Woods ultimately dropped out of high school.
During his first stint in prison, Woods began his own course of study. He was sent to a notoriously harsh prison in Hagerstown, Maryland. He resented authority figures and often directed outbursts at the guards, who responded by putting him on lockup. For 23 hours at a time, and sometimes longer, Woods would be alone in a cell that had no television or radio. One day, a man with a cart of books wound his way through the lockup tiers, shouting, “Library call!” Woods wasn’t interested at first, but his boredom won out: He decided to borrow The Autobiography of Malcolm X and The Sicilian, a Mafia novel by Mario Puzo.
Stevens (right) asked the prison to return Woods’s books, vouching for his character.
The autobiography proved “too complicated,” and The Sicilian was only slightly easier. Still, Woods persisted. “Many, many words I had to skip over because I couldn’t read them,” Woods recalls. Each page took him about five minutes but left him with a glow of accomplishment. By the time he got to the end, about a week had passed. “I remember that I wept,” Woods says—not because of what he had read but because he had succeeded in reading.
Woods soon bought his first dictionary at the prison commissary and began etching words into his memory by copying them down and reading them aloud. He read into the early hours of the morning. “Even though I was confined in a cell, my mind was free,” Woods says. “I could escape.”
“Even though I was confined in a cell, my mind was free, I could escape.”
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