Among the recent changes in BDN format, surely among the very best new things has been finding space for the columns of the teen-ager, Jason Benjamin. His column of June 28 headlined “Real heroes worth emulating are difficult for people to find anymore,” is well done and very sad. It deserves a response — perhaps especially from those of us who already “have become old and have no more forward time progression to carelessly burn.”

Somehow the times in which we live seem to have given you and many young people some very dark glasses, so that you have difficulty recognizing things which are, as we used to say, right in front of your noses. At least in my experience, which may or may not count for much, the largest contingent of real heroes are to be found among our teachers. This was true in my life. I have been in and out of schools in the Bangor system enough to observe that this is true here, too.

In my time we, of course, had athletic heroes. Ted Williams perhaps reigned at the top of that list the longest. And in public life there were at least Dwight Eisenhower and Martin Luther King Jr. But in shaping my life the top of the list starts with parents, church leaders and teachers and, as I have grown older, some of my teachers have grown more and more memorable. Among all my college teachers, one has become most revered, a Dr. Oscar Winfield, from the years 1942 and ’43. But then I remember from high school one of my math teachers, a Mr. Rogers, who was then a very senior teacher who wore “old-fashioned” high starched collars. And a woman math teacher in the eighth grade whose name I can’t remember. And then comes rushing back to mind Miss Esther Olson, my grade school teacher in grades three, four, five, six and seven, in a one-room country schoolhouse. All these and many more had what you describe as “the characteristics of heroes — honor, trust, accountability, compassion, integrity.” I am not sure that I recognized all that at the time, though I loved and respected all those I have named.

I think, my young friend, that such heroes are not hiding from you today. Please take another look! Reuben Lundeen Brewer