In his ripe old age, Fred Rogers of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood stood before an audience filled with accomplished stars to give a speech as he received a lifetime achievement award. Famously, he said nothing at all about himself, or what he had done in his extensive career. Instead, he asked his audience to ponder this question: “Who helped you?”   

Whenever we take a moment to reflect on this question, it frees us to think of someone who really saw us, came to us, and spent time with us. Often this person is a little farther along in life than we are, and we can call that person a mentor.  

For me, there is someone who immediately comes to my mind, resting on my shoulders like a guardian angel. Like streaming water entering the chalice, it is filled with the warmth of human kindness, and I only leave the remembrance wanting to please him with my life. Whatever I do, I want him to smile on it.  If there is any sadness, close to joy, it is when there is something that makes me say, “I wish he could see this.” “He would have liked this.” 

My mentor, Bob Backus, was born in 1932, raised in farm towns, and served in the Korean War. He vividly remembers being a child and seeing a man who he supposed to be a presidential candidate with a cart and donkeys, displaying a large sign which said, “Vote for Wendell Wilkie.” From this man he received a button with the same slogan which he proudly wore, and which caused him many spankings from his teacher, the principal, and his parents. Every time he told the story to me, the picture of Roosevelt in his classroom grew a little bit bigger. He cherished both this button, and ironically, all donkeys, to the end of his days. 

After serving in the army and merchant marines he would later become a ballistics worker, a feed salesman, a millionaire real estate developer, bankrupt, the ringleader of a non-mechanized farming commune, bankrupt, and when I first encountered him, a security guard. 

When I look at our high school students, I can’t help but think of what I was like at that age, and how I must have appeared to him when I first met him in church. My shoes were coming apart, my hair was long and half dyed black, and my coat reeked of cigarettes (not mine, actually). He stood out too. We were at a church called the Salt Mine, where we met in a repurposed auto garage, sang vineyard music with a band, and had many congregants in recovery with prior convictions. Bob, of course, wore a suit and tie, prayed for revival, and greeted everyone with a warm smile and a vigorous handshake. He would make you practice the handshake if you didn’t get it the first time.  

The odd thing is, nobody balked at the ritual, and he could get anyone to do just about anything, at least twice. He was a student of Mr. Dale Carnegie — the namesake of our school’s cross-street — and he really knew How to Win Friends and Influence People. What was more remarkable was that every glowing and positive thing he said was completely genuine and available to anyone. I couldn’t go to the hardware store with him to get a can of paint without him finding at least one person to get to know and make a little happier for knowing him. He also made it obvious that he was a Christian and would tell anyone about Jesus. 

Every Saturday at 5:00 AM he would pull up to my house, which was well out of his way, to pick up my brothers and me for prayer breakfast. On our way up to the foothills in Rocklin, he would stop his car by a ranch where some donkeys grazed and say, “A great man lives there.” We would often work with him at his own ranch or the church. He always insisted on paying us something, even if it was a little bit.   

In the years that followed, I often worked at his ranch, especially after he had suffered an injury to his hand from a dog attack. I painted and fixed wagons for his displays at the county fair and for voter registration. I used a lot of red, white, and blue. He even convinced me to dress up as Abraham Lincoln twice for the 4th of July parade in Lincoln, California. It was hard work painting wagons and sometimes it was so hot outside, the paint would get sticky on the brush before I even got it from the can to the spoke of the wagon. As hard as it was, I would trade anything I have right now if I could sit down one more time with him the way that I used to in the middle of the day and hear him tell a story while we ate a sandwich and some canned soup.  

I witnessed more than one miracle in the time I spent with him when he would travel to hospitals to visit the sick, to pray for the dying. He visited men in prison and invited convicts to work at his home when they needed some money. It was concerning a convalescent home, that he asked me to paint a picture of Christ at Heart’s Door by Warner Sallman. I was in the final year working towards my art degree and it seemed out of place in the art department, but I went to work translating the painting into watercolor. The more I painted, the more I saw in the original:  The nest in doorway, the choking vines, the bars on the window, how gently, but how tirelessly, Christ comes to the door.   

How patient and yet unyielding a mentor needs to be. We can’t expect every adult, or even every teacher, to be a mentor to our youth in the fullest sense. Now that our school has grown to the grade level model, we have discussed the challenge that handing students off to the next teacher can be when it comes to mentoring. I have taught in settings where teachers stay with a class from year to year, and I can say that even then, there was always just one student that I could really mentor. For me, these were the students that I would have hoped to avoid troubling with at first. 

I was really blessed to have the remarkable mentor that I had, and for those that came after him, and I can pray with confidence that our children and our students will have their own mentors, ones that find the way to their hearts.