The toughest teachers are usually the best teachers, or at least that’s been my experience.
And so it was with Dr. Jere Hoar who died Oct. 2 in Pontotoc at the age of 91.
A long article by Michael Newsom in the Oxford Eagle last week aptly described the retired professor, quoting some of Hoar’s former students at the University of Mississippi where he taught journalism for decades.
Among them was legendary journalist and author Curtis Wilkie who grew up in Summit and, after a sterling reporting career, taught journalism at Ole Miss.
Before going on to become a nationally recognized correspondent for the Boston Globe, and later teaching the class himself, Wilkie recalls he got an F from Hoar in advanced reporting.
“I was only about 15 or 20 minutes late turning in an assignment and he flunked me,” Wilkie said. “What I say about it is I learned a very good lesson. I don’t think I ever missed a deadline in my newspaper career.”
Wilkie added that retaking the course in the fall of 1962 to complete his degree requirements kept him at Ole Miss long enough to witness the riot over the enrollment of James Meredith, the university’s first Black student. The event helped shape him as a budding journalist. He also was on campus for the 1962 football season when Ole Miss went undefeated and was recognized as national champion by some rating systems.
I was in the first class Hoar taught at Ole Miss in 1956, “Law and Ethics of the Press,” and it was the toughest journalism course I ever had.
Journalism was a department then, and there weren’t nearly as many students or teachers as there are now in the journalism school.
Our classes were relaxed and laid back, although effective in producing journalists for mostly the print media.
Hoar was different from the other instructors we had. His classes were more structured, formal and demanding. He required a term paper in the Law and Ethics class, something that was unheard at the undergraduate level until he arrived.
But it was an interesting course and one that I enjoyed with the exception of the term paper. It also served me well after I became a reporter and editor.
A little over two decades later my daughter Kathy had a class under Hoar, and he said she was his first second generation student.
By then we were engaging in friendly chats on my visits to Ole Miss.
Wilkie, as quoted in Newsom’s article, had it right: “Jere was very smart and just a damned good teacher. He was a good friend to a lot of his former students, who were then therefore safe from him and his classroom. He’s got a multitude of alums who just became friends with him and very fondly remember him.”
I put Dr. Jere Hoar in the same class with two other individuals who were great teachers but tough and sometimes disliked by those they were mentoring at the time the instruction was given.
One was George Harmon, the city editor on my first newspaper job.
He was exact and demanding, but taught me more about reporting and writing news stories in six months than I had learned in college in three years.
The other was Helen Cameron, my high school English teacher, who taught me enough grammar to pass muster with the likes of Jere Hoar and George Harmon.
Charlie Dunagin is editor and publisher emeritus of the McComb Enterprise-Journal. He lives in Oxford.
