Spanish, robots and Bela Lugosi....

The cover of the reissue of "Music for Robots." The 1961 original album cover was in black and white.

I was sitting in Mr. Richard Sheffield's 8th grade Spanish class at Valley View Junior High in Simi Valley about 1968. He was going on about the lecture that Ray Bradbury had given at Moorpark College the previous evening that he had encouraged us to attend.

Suddenly he wheeled around and pointed at me. "And you! With your talent, you really should have been there!" My classmates all turned around to look at me, wondering what talent I had and how he knew about it.

They didn't know that this teacher and I had history. Sheffield probably had more influence on me than any other educator.

I was in fourth grade at Knolls Elementary when I first met Mr. Sheffield. I opened the door to my classroom expecting Mrs. Mahnken, a lovely, nurturing elementary teacher straight out of Central Casting — grey hair and all. She had previously worked for Disney's art department.

What I saw filled me with indignation. A man with a small black mustache, and black frame glasses wearing a beret, a red plaid vest, black pants and suit jacket was leaning back in my teacher's chair with his feet on the desk and his fingers interlaced over a quite chubby belly. I was incensed that his black dress ankle boots were defiling my sweet teacher's desk.

How dare he?

I had no idea then how much this man who infuriated me would change my life.

I don't remember what all we did in class that day, but in the afternoon, he pulled a vinyl album titled "Music for Robots" out of his briefcase (I had never seen a teacher with a attache case before) and put it on the classroom's portable record player, which was roughly the size of a Buick.

An ad for "Music for Robots"
 in "Famous Monsters of Filmland."

One side of this record was Forrest J. Ackerman talking about famous robots, and the other was all experimental music. I want to say it was a Moog synthesizer, but I can't swear to it. Mr. Sheffield played us the music side, gave us crayons and paper and told us to draw what the music made us see.

I can't draw to save my life, but I was loving the assignment, and created a huge eye in the center of the page with optic nerves that snaked around the corners and became other creatures. I think I impressed him, because the substitute had high praise for my creation.

I ran home eager to show it to my mother, who was less impressed than I about how the sub had spent our instruction time. I found out later that Sheffield was a good friend of Forry Ackerman, the science fiction and movie memorabilia collector. Over the years, I learned many interesting things about my teacher.

What can I say? He won me over, and I was glad when he became my math and science teacher in fifth grade. Sheffield had a huge interest in paleontology, and he took us on a field trip to a wash at the other end of the Simi Valley to hunt for fossils. It's because of him that I have the urge to look for trilobites every time I pass Red Rock Canyon.

Richard Sheffield's photo from imdb.com

Like every grade school teacher, Mr. Sheffield had to control schoolroom chatter, and his method was "hush cards." You brought in or made three cards to put on the corner of your desk (mine were Beatles trading cards), and when you got caught talking or misbehaving, you forfeited a card. When you lost the last card, you were punished, sort of "three-strikes and you're out."

He decided one day that because we were acting immature, anyone who lost all their cards that day were going to have to spend the day in kindergarten. "All except you, Kim. You'd have a good time there." How well he knew me...

In fact, he knew I was a writer before I did. At some point he was my English teacher, and I read him my crappy short story about meeting the Beatles on a train, poems about the Painted Desert and other natural wonders, and the beginning of some horrible Dickensian novel. I didn't take any of it seriously, but he told me I should.

The summer between sixth grade and junior high I went on an exchange program to Mexico, at Sheffield's urging. His wife was from Mexico, and I'm not sure how he was involved, but I spent a month down there with a family who had a girl roughly my age, then she returned with me and spent a month in California.

To prepare myself, I took Sheffield's Spanish class he taught in adult night school. I had to get permission from my school principal, and my parents drove me to Simi High where I learned alongside adults, drinking hot chocolate while they chatted over coffee when the catering truck came at break.

When I went to junior high, he stayed at Knolls for a year. I was mad because after I left, he got permission to adapt Ray Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles" for the stage, and his sixth-grade English class wrote the script and produced the play. Sheffield got Forry to loan him the original monster from "The Blob" to use in the alien scene. He was trying to convince Bradbury (also a friend) to show up for the performance.

The next year he moved to Valley View Junior High and became my Spanish teacher again. That was where I really learned about Mr. Sheffield. He is a natural raconteur, and whenever classmates hadn't done their homework, they begged me to get him off on a tangent so he would forget to collect it.

He grew up in Hollywood, and had a million fascinating stories about Tinsel Town in the 1950s. He told us he had been a pallbearer at Bela Lugosi's funeral, and that he had met Stan Laurel.

At that time Stan Laurel was in the phone book, and my teacher and his teenage buddies simply called him up and were invited over. Laurel spent the afternoon reminiscing, and taught them the lighting-your-thumb-on-fire trick. I wouldn't find out the whole truth about his connection with Lugosi for many years, until the advent of the Internet.

Bela Lugosi as his most famous character, Dracula

Apparently, the teenaged Sheffield met Lugosi in the final years of his life, and they became quite close. The aging actor was unwell, and movie roles were scarce. Bela had a stack of signed 8x10 glossies, and Sheffield asked for them. He wanted to bolster interest in the "Dracula" actor, and started a Bela Lugosi fan club, offering an autographed photo to anyone who signed up. There's a photo of the two friends here.

Sheffield co-authored a book called "Bela Lugosi: Dreams and Nightmares," and co-produced a documentary about the actor.

For years, I wondered what had become of my former teacher. I knew that at one point he was in Mexico City teaching, and I did have a letter from him a few years after junior high.

Last week, I stumbled across a YouTube video of him speaking at Monster Bash 2007 about how he cut school from Hollywood High to visit the set of "The Black Sleep" with Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr. and John Carradine.

He was as nattily dressed as ever, sporting a black cape. Apparently, he always loved costumes, because there are photos of him dressed up as Dracula and the Werewolf of London here. I laughed when he said on the video he took his beret and cigarette holder to the set that day, because I'd seen that beret.

I don't how to contact him, but I'd love to be able to tell Sheffield that he was right all those years ago: I AM a writer, even if I tried to ignore that fact for years. I may not be a teacher because of him, but I want to be a teacher like him. Sadly, his kind wouldn't survive in today's No Child Left Behind, endless standardized testing atmosphere.

My old teacher's innovative teaching techniques designed to wake up students' intellects and make them question the world around them isn't highly prized. But I owe him a huge debt.