"The North End of a Southbound Horse"

Throughout my life, I have come into contact with multiple people and personalities that will not soon be forgotten. And as one goes through the giant pool of personalities that is high school, you have to have at least one person during those four years of your life that does something remarkable, something perhaps unexpected, or does something that goes way out of their way to push you a little farther than your comfort zone may be in order for you to truly succeed in whatever it may be that you aspire to.
The man of my story is named Mike Gordy, Journalism and Senior Composition teacher at Antioch Community High School in Antioch, Illinois. A man with over twenty years of Journalism experience under his belt, Gordy was everything a high school journalist would one day hope to retire to; an amazing house, constantly giving lectures at high school press conferences, multiple staffs competing at collegiate level Journalism. All of these he did perfectly and flawlessly, never wavering in his decisions to keep a story the way it was, or a page design that would be flipped completely around in order to put us on a completely different level as far as design went.
But this isn't a story about Gordy, it's about the real man behind the accomplishments. My senior year of high school, I was Editor-in-chief of the nationally ranked "Tom Tom" paper. Being away from the program for a year, it was a shock to be told I was going to head the operation with only 3 seniors, 12 juniors and 2 sophomores. Hardly the talent pool that the staff had two years prior, winning National Scholastic Press Association's "All-American" award for the second year in a row, I was in over my head for the first two months of the class.
To make a long story extremely short, Gordy had all these "mannerisms" that he would unleash upon us whenever the staff was stuck in a rut or constantly be making the same mistake. The most memorable one Gordy graced us with was, "Guys, if we keep publishing this...this...doo-doo-ca-ca, when we go to competition, we are going to look like the North end of a Southbound horse."
At this point, all of us were keeling over with laughter, but after awhile, it got to me in everything I put my mind to, school or work related. Something so simple and clever as that phrase could get me to perform to my best, thinking to myself what Gordy would say about anything that would get graded.
From that year on, I think of Gordy almost as a second father, only because we were in the same room eighty percent of the time and he could put all of my questions into perspective and give me an answer without really revealing the way to get to it, forcing me to figure out the way for myself. Long live Michael Gordy.