Darrell Hatch, 1934-2024

Darrel Hatch died last week. He was 90 years old. I never knew it, but he was a farm boy, grew up just outside of Prescott, Arizona. I don't imagine a soul who's reading this has any idea just who a man named Darrel Hatch is. Or was.

Well, for one,  he was a teacher and dang good one, if you listened to kids, as I did, when the two of us taught long ago at Greenway High School. Often enough, as that brand new high school fought to discover what teaching was all about, the lines of argument would be steady, the school's only Dutch Calvinist, the Mormons (like Darrel), and a couple of dedicated Roman Catholics, against, well, the others.

I wasn't always comfortable about being allied with the LDS folk, but it was impossible not to see their rich grounding in Christ--well, okay, Brigham Young too. My Mormon students were, back then, among the brightest and most convivial of kids. They wanted me badly to read the book and join the clan.

Fascinatingly, the most dedicated of them are no longer  LDS.

But Darrell Hatch, math teacher extraordinaire, was deep and faithful Mormon, going on four missions all around the world, his obit says.  "After high school he attended BYU for two years and then came home to prepare for his church mission." 

I knew nothing of that. "During that summer, he met a cute young woman named Rinda. He served a 2 1/2 year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. He served as a Spanish-speaking missionary in the Texas and New Mexico region."

2 1/2 years? Get that?

Sometimes I couldn't help but wonder if the missions the LDS expected of its own didn't build Mormon character as well.

I don't know. What I learned quickly at Greenway was that the world I'd spoken of at Dordt College was far, far bigger than I'd ever surmised. Darrell Hatch, the math guy, made that very clear, and he never taught me a dime's worth of freshman math. 

He was a fine, fine man.