More than 30 years ago, J.D. Minnehan made us diagram sentences on the blackboard until I wanted to gnaw off my right hand so I'd have a good excuse for not holding the chalk. Fortunately, I reconsidered. Today, I still have my right hand and whatever grammar I know I can credit to J.D. Minnehan.

Mr. Minnehan was my junior high school English teacher. That was more than 30 years ago. Fresh from college, he was in his first year or two of teaching. Ten years older than most of his students, he was an adult. At the time, 10 years seemed like an eternity. Now, it's nothing.

J.D. Minnehan died a few weeks ago. He was 58 and succumbed to cancer. I was shocked ñ and saddened ñ to read of his death as I ate lunch one day but glad the Lexington Herald-Leader and staff writer Jennifer Hewlett had given readers a very detailed story about Mr. Minnehan, his career and passing. More newspapers should publish those types of stories. You know, the kind that get real personal and have an impact on readers. I know readers wish they did too.

Over the years, Minnehan moved from the classroom to the principal's office. Eventually, he moved on to the superintendent's office. He led school districts in Danville and Trigg, Jackson and McCreary counties. It was during his Trigg County assignment that I last spoke with him. Honestly, I hadn't thought about him for years but then seven or eight years ago I read an Associated Press story about a state task force that studied a ban on paddling in Kentucky schools. I was stunned when the story said a J.D. Minnehan had chaired the task force.

J.D. Minnehan? Could it be the same J.D. Minnehan that I knew from the old Bardstown Junior High School? The same J.D. Minnehan, a former college baseball player, who had a wicked swing with baseball bats and paddles? The same J.D. Minnehan who paddled students in front of the class so hard that they were often lifted off their heels when struck on their backsides?

Surely this wasn't the same person. How could an educator who once paddled his students with great vigor now chair a group studying a paddling ban, I asked myself?

It just so happened that in the years since school, I'd become, first, a radio news broadcaster and then, later, a print journalist. By the time I read the AP story quoting Minnehan, I was editor of the daily paper in Elizabethtown, The News-Enterprise. And I needed material for my weekly Sunday column.

There it was. A paddling fan had experienced a dramatic change of heart. So, I called J.D. Minnehan at the Trigg County Board of Education. I fully expected to have to explain who I was ñ that I had been one of his students in his first year of teaching and knew (not from experience but from observation) that he very much believed in corporal punishment at one time. So how could he explain this total change of heart?

Picking up the phone, Mr. Minnehan disarmed me completely because as soon as I told him my name he immediately replied that he remembered me well, remembered my class, remembered that Mark Edwards was my best buddy and how were we all doing?

I was stunned. I didn't expect his total recall of events from nearly a quarter century earlier.

Finally, I got around to asking him about his change of heart on corporal punishment.

"I was wrong," he replied. It was that simple. He had been wrong 25 years earlier to paddle so many students, he said. Suddenly, any hopes of my "exposing" in print his contradictory behavior evaporated. I still got a good column from the conversation but it didn't turn out the way I initially thought it would.

That was the only time I spoke to J.D. Minnehan in the 30 years since I graduated from high school. But he had a remarkable effect on my life thanks to diagramming all those darn sentences and giving me a good knowledge of grammar which occasionally comes in handy in this line of work.