"Bring Your Red Books to Class"

University School, Lower Campus

As a rising 7th grader at University School in Shaker Heights, I was terrified of Seymour Richard Peyser. He was known as a staunch grammarian and a steadfast disciplinarian who tolerated no nonsense in his English composition classes.

For all that, “Peyser,” as some students disrespectfully called him, was the butt of many jokes. There were rumors (false) that someone crawled under his desk and tied his leather shoes together. There were other rumors (patently false) that his car, an MG, was brought in through a window during a study hall to shock him when he entered the room.

The only prank I witnessed was students moving their lips and pretending to speak to him, making him turn up his hearing aid.

During morning assemblies (or “Chapel,” as we called it back then), Mr. Peyser pressed the hidden button under the stage in the lunchroom to ring a bell and remind students to “Bring your red books to class.” The stout red books were Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition – dry stuff that I’m sure no one teaches today, yet they formed the bedrock of reading and writing in the 1970s.

I proved myself a capable student, memorizing the helping verbs from the red book with dutiful, almost obsessive diligence. I can still recite them by rote: is, am, are, was, were, be, been, being, have, has, had, do, does, did, can, could, should, would, shall, will, may, might, must.

His fearsomeness notwithstanding, Mr. Peyser was, at heart, a pushover who called me “Pete.” Under the aegis of Peyser’s Players, he directed a middle school production of the 1892 comedy Charlie’s Aunt, my first exposure to cross-dressing. High jinks ensued. 

By the time I was in high school, working a summer job at the tennis courts, I would see Mr. Peyser playing tennis in the evenings. We struck up a friendship. 

He was a dear man who died in 2003 at 93. I learned from Mr. Peyser’s obituary that he was a father of three, a grandfather of six, a literacy volunteer, and the author of two novels.

Today, whenever I drive by the entrance to the University School Shaker Heights campus, I still hear the words, “Bring your red books to class.’

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