"No Way to Stop It"
My fifth grade teacher taught me a lot about standing up for my beliefs.
(Listen to the radio version here.)
In 1961, when I was in fifth grade, I fell in love. Mr. Borkowski was 24 years old, and this was his first year as a teacher. He’d been a bus driver who’d finished two years of college and was attending Northwestern University at night to complete his degree when he read an ad about teaching in Catholic elementary schools and found out that he met the minimum requirements. (They were in dire need of teachers at the height of the baby boom.) Despite his inexperience and the demands of teaching 55 students all day and then rushing out to his demanding college classes every night, he infused every subject with joy and energy. He was 6’3” in height, but when he talked one on one to us, he dropped to one knee to look us straight in the eye. He knew exactly how to make a shy little girl feel special and valued.
Mr. Borkowski loved musicals, and The Sound of Music had been on Broadway for a year or two, so he brought a copy of the soundtrack with Mary Martin and Theodore Bikel to school and taught us several of the songs.
Every year on my birthday my Grandpa sent me $5. Usually my mother kept it, but that year I begged her to let me keep $3.50 to buy the record. At first she refused. When I pointed out that the record cost about the same as one of her bottles of Southern Comfort or cartons of Pall Malls but would last a lot longer, I got a beating but won the point. I listened to that record so often that even when the record player was off, I could still hear the songs in my head, helping me tune out whatever was going on around me.
Of all the wonderful songs on that soundtrack, my favorite was “No Way to Stop It,” a song most people aren’t familiar with because it wasn’t in the movie version. Sung by Captain Von Trapp, Max, and Elsa, it’s entirely political—something I would have had no clue about as a little kid except that Mr. Borkowski explained the song to us. The Nazis were taking over Austria, and the Captain refused to accept or be cowed by these evil forces. Max and Elsa thought he needed to be practical and safe by compromising or at least pretending to play along, since there was no way to stop them. The song “No Way to Stop It” was the turning point of the play—Captain Von Trapp realized that Elsa was too willing to go along with what he felt was profoundly wrong, and at the end of the song, they broke their engagement. (The movie version, made several years after Hammerstein’s death, jettisoned much of that message along with the song, suggesting that the breakup was due to Elsa’s lack of interest in the Captain’s children and her realizing that he was falling in love with Maria, not his refusal to remain engaged to a Nazi sympathizer. When I scraped up enough babysitting money to see the movie in high school, I was cosmically disappointed that the best song wasn’t there. That has always been a central flaw in the movie version for me.)
In 1961, The Sound of Music went on the road and spent a year at Chicago’s Shubert Theater with Florence Henderson playing Maria. Mr. Borkowski and several parent volunteers arranged a matinee field trip during Christmas vacation. I think the tickets cost the same as the record, but my mother said it would be a waste of money since I already had the record.
I did my best to hide my disappointment in the weeks before the big event—I at least had my record to play over and over! I was very shy and scared of being noticed anyway, and it was easy to hide in a class of 55. But a few days before the field trip, Mr. Borkowski asked me to stay after school for a moment. I thought I was in trouble, but after everyone left, he told me that the tickets had arrived and there was an “extra” one. Would I like to go? Imagine that.
The dedication page of my Sharing the Wonder of Birds with Kids reads:
This book is dedicated to Arthur Borkowski, my fifth grade teacher, who taught me to open my eyes without closing my heart.
One of the happiest experiences of my life was reconnecting with him in 2013, during my Big Year, when I was in Florida. I brought him to Disney World.
When I visited him again in 2014, he took me to see my lifer Nanday Parakeets near where he lived in Sarasota. The irony of that? It turns out Mr. Borkowski was terrified of birds!
The last time I saw him was on April 7, 2018. He died on July 5, 2019. How I will always love that man.
The song “No Way to Stop It” embodies a powerful belief of mine—that even when someone has power over us and we can’t possibly stop them alone, we are morally obliged to stay true to what we know is right, and to speak out against what hurts others.
None of this would have anything to do with birds except for this: many of the people being suggested for important positions in the next administration have horrible track records when it comes to environmental and wildlife protections. This is scary, and it really feels like there’s no way to stop it.
The way we made progress on environmental laws in the 1960s and 70s was little by little, people rolling up their sleeves and carefully gathering evidence, opening other people’s eyes to the problems, and pressuring their representatives in Congress to support environmental legislation. This time around, the corporations and billionaires are savvier, control most of the funds for research, and own most of the means of communication in the country. If that wasn’t enough of an advantage, most of our representatives in Congress and virtually everyone being proposed for the new executive branch are beholden to those corporations and billionaires.
Yet somehow we must keep fighting for what we love, and speaking out when we can. Mary Quinn wrote: “There are times when you must speak, not because you are going to change the other person, but because if you don't speak, they have changed you.”
Thank you again, Laura, for reminding us of the important decisions each of us has the power to make in this worrisome time, and for restoring our faith that we still have a voice and the right to use it.
What a powerful story about the song No Way to Stop It...Gives me more respect and pride in Capt. Von Trapp...wish they'd kept it in the play/movie and explaining the meaning of it! So glad you got to reconnect with Mr. Bokowski before he died...I wouldn't be surprised he "helped" out other children who couldn't afford the ticket...but wouldn't let the kids know or parents...!