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personnel employed at RCHS since its opening.
The rapport Titchenell maintained with his students is illustrated by a plaque that hangs in his “brag room.” Presented to him by his charges, it reads “If you can’t baffle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull.”
But Titchenell’s courses were more than games and camraderie. By his own admission, he took his classes seriously and expected his students to do likewise. He was famous (or infamous, depending on point of view) for the daily question he assigned. In 1977, after Rappahannock’s baseball Panthers had advanced to the state finals, several senior team members came into government fully expecting to be let off from the daily question as a reward and celebration for their achievement. “I slapped a baseball bat down on the desk and announced ‘You polecats can still expect the daily question,’ ” Titchenell recalled. His reference to polecats was picked up by the annual staff and immortalized in the yearbook for 1977.
High School Grad At Last
Upon his retirement from teaching last year, Titchenell was honored at graduation exercises with a diploma from BCHS. “The kids always wanted to know how I made the short cut,” he joked.
Now Titchenell is considering a second retirement—this time from the ministry. “It’s time for me to step down, I think, and make way for some young people to take over,” he explained. But the step presents a difficult decision for the family.
Retirement will mean moving away out of the home where the Titchenells have lived happily for 19 years, where four Titchenell children have grown up. It may also mean leaving Rappahannock County since Gale and Blondina haven’t been able to find a house that they can afford on his pensions—even with the hefty down payment that the
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