Former classroom teacher Pat Conroy earned acclaim as an accomplished write of memoirs and novels. Photo credit: Pat Conroy

Many outstanding classroom teachers have also made a name for themselves as successful authors. One of these was (Donald) Patrick Conroy, who has written a number of highly-acclaimed memoirs and novels, two of which were made into movies that were nominated for Academy Awards.

Pat was born on Oct. 26, 1945, in Atlanta, Georgia, the first of seven children born to a fighter pilot in the Marines and his wife. During his childhood, Pat’s family moved frequently to military bases throughout the South, eventually landing in South Carolina. After his high school graduation he earned his Bachelor’s degree from The Citadel, a military college located in Charleston, South Carolina.

Once he earned his degree, Pat accepted a teaching position at his alma mater, Beaufort High School. There he taught English and psychology. In 1969 he took a job teaching underprivileged students in grades five through eight in a one-room schoolhouse on Daufuskie, a small island about three miles off the South Carolina mainland.

Pat found teaching conditions on Daufuskie very challenging. He discovered that as far as education was concerned, the students had been severely neglected, and nearly all the students were illiterate. After just a year of teaching on Daufuskie, Pat was fired for using unconventional teaching strategies, including his use of experiential learning practices and his refusal to use corporal punishment, and for his confrontations with administrators. He wrote a 1972 memoir about this experience entitled The Water is Wide. The volume earned an award from the National Education Association for its honest depiction of institutionalized racism in public schools. In 1974, the book was adapted into the movie Conrack directed by Martin Ritt and starring Jon Voight.

This former teacher also wrote The Boo (1970); The Great Santini (1976); The Lords of Discipline (1980); Beach Music (1995); and The Prince of Tides (1986); the memoir My Losing Season (2002); The Pat Conroy Cookbook (2004); South of Broad (2009); a collection of essays entitled My Reading Life (2010); the memoir The Death of Santini (2013). His novels The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini were made into films, and both were nominated for Academy Awards.

Sadly, this Chalkboard Champion succumbed to pancreatic cancer on March 4, 2016, in Beaufort, South Carolina. He was 70 old. He is interred in a small cemetery on St. Helena Island near the Penn Center, where as a teenager he first met Martin Luther King and where he was honored in 2011 for his dedication to social justice.