I don’t remember the last time I saw Mr. Hartwig, but I remember the last time I saw his widow. It was Christmas break in 1988 and I was home from my freshman year of college. Her husband had died just a few weeks earlier. I went to her house with a friend to offer condolences, and I must have said something about how important my former journalism teacher had been to me.

I’m sure I even meant it, but back when I was 18, I really had no idea. Now, at age 50, I can say it with more authority and conviction: This was the guy who may have shaped the course of my life more than anyone outside my family.

“A teacher affects eternity,” wrote Henry Adams. “He can never tell where his influence stops.” The same could be said for coaches, bosses, and others — mentors who motivate young people when they are most open to influence. For me, the great influencer was James C. Hartwig, who taught journalism at J. P. Taravella High School in Coral Springs, Fla.

Throughout my schooling, I was blessed with a lot of good instructors, from the ladies who showed me how to hold a pencil to the one who made me read Macbeth. Even the smallest of comments could leave a big mark. In middle school, in the wake of some writing assignment, an English teacher told my mother that perhaps I’d grow up to work for Time. She was right about the industry but wrong about the publication: The magazine where I’d do most of my work didn’t have a red border on its cover but a blue one. What she said, though, put a notion in my head. It took Mr. Hartwig, a few years later, to turn the subject of daydreams into a concrete possibility.

We called him “the Wigster,” and he looked a bit like Ron Swanson, the character played by actor Nick Offerman on the television comedy Parks and Recreation, with brushed-back brown hair and a bushy mustache. On the show, Swanson is notorious and hilarious for the way in which he holds his government job in contempt. Hartwig, by contrast, was a committed public-school educator who not only taught his classes during the day but also stayed after the final bell and came in on weekends so that we could put out the Chariot, a monthly student newspaper.

My first rite-of-passage experience as an amateur reporter came when I was assigned a story about the soccer team. I had to interview the coach on the field behind school after practice. For a bookish kid who was drawn to journalism because he liked to read, this was a terrifying prospect because it meant talking to an adult I didn’t know.

As the practice wrapped up, I half hoped the coach would say he didn’t have time for me, so that I could slink away without having to go through the ordeal of asking him about his season. Sometimes today, when I’m sitting in a waiting room to talk to a governor, a senator, or another eminence for National Review, I think back to that moment when I almost chickened out — but also remember how I managed to blurt out a few questions, jot down the replies in a notebook, and survive. If my life were a comic book, this would be my origin story.

One of the reasons I went through with it was that I didn’t want to disappoint Mr. Hartwig, who pushed us to publish an excellent newspaper. In his journalism classes, he stressed the importance of accuracy. Always ask how to spell names because the time you don’t bother will be the time when “Mr. Peterson” is actually “Mr. Petersen.” He was a stickler for details, believing that if you get the little things right, you’re more likely to get the big things right.

He also knew that the best way to teach journalism is to make students do journalism. This was a version of shop class: You set aside the books and learn to use tools and build things by using tools and building things. So we put out the Chariot, month after month: interviewing sources, writing articles, and laying out pages in Room 425, with its typesetting machines and light tables, and the chemical aroma of film development. We weren’t the ink-stained wretches of yesteryear: This was the dawn of the digital revolution, when floppy disks ruled. Yet there were few screens. Much of our work was manual, as we measured column inches with rulers, cut copy with X-Acto blades, straightened border tape, pasted up pages, and prepared color overlays by hand. With this approach, the experience became the teacher — but Mr. Hartwig was always there, with a pencil tucked behind his ear, showing us the way and urging us to do our best work.

An old put-down from George Bernard Shaw claims: “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.” Occasionally I’ve smirked at this line, but in truth I don’t like it, partly for how its humor depends on arrogance but mostly for how it basks in an ignorance of what teachers actually do. And it insults the memory of great teachers like Mr. Hartwig.

In my attic, I keep a bundle of yellowed issues of the Chariot. They’re full of articles about clubs, sports, and school news. We also published earnest two-page spreads on single themes, such as the rise of computers and the spread of AIDS. I wrote a humor column that shows flickers of promise but mostly hasn’t aged well. The proper name for much of this probably is “juvenilia,” but it’s impossible not to see an inchoate professionalism. We aspired to be taken seriously, in large part because Mr. Hartwig insisted that we take our work seriously.

During my senior year, I was in charge of the opinion pages. I editorialized in favor of a new attendance policy. I criticized the school administration’s decision to crack down on indoor smoking by locking the bathrooms at certain times and proposed that student smokers have access to an outdoor patio. I crusaded against a countywide grading scale that I found outrageous.

I also wrote a negative review of The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom. In 1987, Bloom’s condemnation of moral relativism had become a surprise bestseller, and it seemed as though everybody in the grown-up media wanted to comment. Conservatives tended to support Bloom and liberals tended to disapprove. At the time, my own politics were unformed, and I just wanted to join the conversation. So I read the book — as I said, I was bookish — and I even understood parts of it. The section that grabbed most of my attention was a minor passage in which Bloom repudiates rock music. This colored my impression of everything else, and so I mocked it.

Reading my review today, I see it as wrongheaded: pure juvenilia. I may have written it with an eye toward what an editor at Rolling Stone, which I read regularly, would have thought. I still enjoy rock music, but Bloom’s larger points stayed with me. Eventually they sank in. This became my Goldwater moment: I knew in my heart that he was right about moral relativism.

Is it any mystery that I wound up at National Review?

I don’t know what Mr. Hartwig thought about Allan Bloom or National Review, if anything. Maybe their names would have prompted him to utter his favorite response to nonsense: “Pshaw!” It hardly matters. I think I know what he saw in Room 425: a kid who was struggling with big ideas and trying to put thoughts into words. His only agenda was to help.

There’s so much I’d like to say to him today, starting with a simple expression of gratitude, but I can’t: He died on November 28, 1988, at the age of 41, in a parking-lot accident.

A few months ago, I was thinking about Mr. Hartwig and the debt I’ll never repay. Then came a flash of inspiration: Maybe I could track down his kids, using some of the journalistic skills that their dad taught me decades ago. After a bit of sleuthing, I found his daughter. She put me in touch with his widow. I said to them what I wish I could say to him: Thank you, Wigster. Your influence lives.