Dear Patton Oswalt, a Kansas woman took your advice and found her kindergarten teacher
Serendipity, thy name is Patton Oswalt.
In August, the comedian tweeted a photo of himself with his former high school AP government teacher, Ron Richards.
“I just bought him fajitas,” Oswalt wrote to his more than 4 million Twitter followers. “If there’s a teacher who helped guide you, track ‘em down and buy ‘em dinner. You can never fully repay them, but it’s a start.”
Oswalt unleashed a flood of passionate responses, hundreds of them. In Lawrence, Kansas, Jennifer Parson responded with a tweet which The Kansas City Star included in a story about Oswalt’s thank-a-teacher campaign.
“I’ve been trying to track down my kindergarten teacher for years with no luck. Susan Held, Tomahawk Elementary, Olathe KS 1982. (If anyone out there knows her),” Parson tweeted.
And lo!
With an assist from her former fourth-grade teacher, Parson discovered that Held lives in Johnson County, Kansas and tweeted on Friday that the two had reunited on October 15.
“Two months ago @pattonoswalt tweeted about taking his teacher to dinner, and I replied looking for my kindergarten teacher,” Parson wrote.. “@LisaGinKC at the Kansas City Star wrote about it. My 4th grade teacher saw the article and called Mrs. Held. We had dinner last Monday.”
(Full disclosure: The writer of this story is @LisaGinKC, whose number of Twitter followers could probably fit in Oswalt’s backyard.)
“Things just sort of fell into place in a domino effect,” Parson, a child welfare worker who works with children in foster care and their families, told The Kansas City Star via a Twitter message on Friday.
“I’d been looking for my teacher for years with no luck, so when I got a Facebook message from her daughter a few days after that tweet I was blown away.”
She tweeted one reason why Held is so dear to her all these many years later.
In a tweet, Parson described her 5-year-old self as “fearless, weird, and creative. This woman took time out of the school day to let me direct an impromptu production of ‘Sleeping Beauty.’ I moved my classmates around the ‘stage’ and whispered their lines to them.”
The student can now call the teacher by her first name.
Parson told the Star that “Susan and I had a lovely dinner catching up.”
This story was originally published October 26, 2018 at 4:51 PM.