Honoring an English man from Matawan Lloyd has taught generations of families in his 60 years on the job BY KAREN E. BOWES Staff Writer SCOTT PILLING staff Howard Lloyd, an English teacher at Matawan Regional High School, has taught at the school for 60 years. He is also a graduate of the school, class of 1937. He has no plans to retire. ABERDEEN - Howard Lloyd isn't going to let a little thing like time get in his way. Since 1947, his English class has been a mainstay at Matawan Regional High School. And as far as he's concerned, next September will be no different. "One does not want to waste one's life, does one?" he says when the subject of retirement comes up. For Lloyd, the idea of a party for his 60th year of teaching is ridiculous. "I mean, what's the difference between 59 and 61?" he asks. Although he refuses to give his age, (he insists he's not a day over 71), as a 1937 graduate of the high school, he'll let the reader do the math. Not that it really matters to him. To Lloyd, age appears to be an unimportant detail in a life spent dedicated to the enrichment of others. Not only has he been around long enough to teach three generations of families, he also sold Matawan the land for its public library for a whopping $1. His father, Howard Lloyd Sr., was the one and only member of the high school's first graduating class in 1898. His roots run even deeper, with Lloyd Road named "accidentally" after his grandfather, Henry Lloyd, a Civil War veteran. As he tells it, about 75 years ago, the area now known as Matawan and Aberdeen was mostly farmland. The only real roads were the dirt trails left behind by tractors. At one point, "someone got the brilliant idea to name them," Lloyd said. After a while, as farms passed from one hand to another, many of these roads were plowed over. All except one, he said - Lloyd Road. "This whole area here was either swamp or field or weeds," he said. "I think there were probably six, at the most, farmhouses out here. And otherwise it was one big mess. " Lloyd said the times have changed, but the students have not. With the arrival of "Mr. Levitt" and the cul-de-sac, the students are now slightly more sophisticated than before. "Before, it was like a family," he said. "I knew everybody. I had all the students. As we grew, I didn't have all the students. You have advantages with size, but you lose the family touch. You sacrifice one for the other. As far as I'm concerned, we maintain a feeling of family around here even though we don't know everybody anymore. But we still maintain the feeling." In his wallet, Lloyd carries a photo of himself taken during World War II in snowy northern Italy. In it, he's dressed in his army uniform, flashing the same toothy smile he maintains today, "That's not a smile, that's a sneer," he quipped. In addition to teaching English, Lloyd now recounts his firsthand experience of World War II during history classes. Looking down at the photo of himself, he recalls that it was taken around the same time he watched two Italian women stumble across the border "from God knows where," both dressed in rags, without shoes and near-starved. He said it was the war that made him a teacher. Promoted to lieutenant, he was forced to train others in things he had absolutely no idea how to do. As a private, his sergeant inspired his love of English literature by quoting Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard … out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by barren wasteland, nothing." After the war, Lloyd returned home to finish up his college degree and begin a teaching career at Matawan Regional High School. Eventually, he graduated from Rutgers University with a double major in English and social studies and a minor in psychology. "No one else would take me," he said half jokingly when asked how he came to teach at his alma mater. "They had an opening, and I came and I stayed." When it comes to motivation, he said it's impossible to explain. "There must be something I enjoy about it," Lloyd said. "You can't write it down in one sentence or one paragraph." He enjoys teaching the origin of the language. "We start with the Egyptians," he said. "The Germans and their guttural language, the conglomeration of French and German, and the church is in there with Latin. A Germanic language with Latin rules and French spellings, that's English. I take them all through that so they'll understand what's weird about it and what's straight about it. Because it does have a lot of strict rules and relationships, and sometimes how come this? And how come that? I tell them how come." On May 31, the school will honor Mr. Lloyd, as he's known to his generations of students, with a party at the Buttonwood Manor. Pattie Mattern, a history and criminal justice teacher at the high school, is organizing the event. Anyone can attend the event, according to Mattern, including former students. No invitation is needed.