When Mr. Hamel was in first grade, his teacher asked his class to choose a career from a picture of dressed up kids. Appealed by a kid dressed in a “head dress, fringed jacket, moccasins” and with “a hippy and a rebel vibe”, young Mr. Hamel told his teacher that he wanted to be an “Indian”.
Mr. Hamel described his middle and high school life as “Norman Rockwelleresque”— boring and occasionally scary. He recalled “riding along with Bernie Bunn who would shut the headlights of his 1974 SS Nova off in the black pitch of night and drive at a high rate of speech…in order to avoid the patrolling eyes of the local game warden, who would surely look sourly upon his habit of hunting raccoons from a vehicle.”
Mr. Hamel graduated from UNL with a major in education. He also went to Creighton University where he obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree. Mr. Hamel classified himself as a “Blue Husker”, which he said “sounds about right for these days”.
In his “youthful and idealistic search for truth”, Mr. Hamel found that he belonged in neither philosophy nor journalism. Fourty two years into teaching, he exclaimed that he is still trying to find what to do. Though, Mr. Hamel explained that “spending the interim teaching here and elsewhere has been beyond rewarding”.
Since he lives close by, Mr. Hamel chose a job at Brownell. He had heard of BT’s strong reputation and was familiar with their standing as the top college preparatory school. “I was not wrong,” he said.
Mr. Hamel’s future plans currently revolve around retirement, writing poetry, and writing fiction. His advice to current students was the following: “to be ever curious and to see all of this world and our extraordinary time in it as a gift – ‘cause it is.”
