After spending 43 years as a teacher, Rick Wolf of Madison has a good grasp on which learning techniques really work on kids. He recently applied them to a children's Christmas story he wrote and published called Mistletoe.

In 1969, Rick earned a master's degree in communication disorders and his first job as a speech and language pathologist was in Newtown. He spent one year there before Madison, much closer to home, needed to hire a speech and language pathologist. He stayed here until 1983.

"I knew that Madison didn't have one because we had a lot of kids from Madison coming to the speech clinic at the time at Southern [Connecticut State University]. I was the first in Madison."

His final month of teaching took place in Clinton in June 2005, or so he thought at the time. His skills were still very much in demand, so he found leaving impossible.

"Being a speech and language pathologist, you are rare," he points out, "especially a male in the field, so I immediately got offers. I worked three years two days a week at Branford High School and then in the middle of that I was hired to work at the middle school in East Haven. I just retired this past June after working there for seven years or so."

From Classrooms to Bookshelves

Before he had fully left the world of teaching, Rick had already started on a new career path to keep him busy during retirement.

He recently published a book years in the making called Mistletoe. In the book, Santa finds a hungry dog seeking shelter under his sled and takes the dog back to the North Pole with him, where he names him Mistletoe and nurses him back to health. Santa's cat, Purrfect, becomes jealous and devises sneaky ways to get Mistletoe in trouble with Santa. On Christmas Eve, Santa locks Mistletoe in a cage to keep him from causing more trouble. Right before he's due to begin delivering presents, Santa falls asleep. Mistletoe must try to break free from his cage to wake Santa in time to save Christmas.

Rick says the idea came to him in a classroom in 1991.

"I used to do a lot of language lessons in K/1 classes," he explains. "The [Lewin G.] Joel [Jr.] School in Clinton had 16 K/1 classes at the time. It was the second-most populated elementary school in the state. One year it was getting close to Christmas and I wanted to do a lesson in visualization, so I thought I would write a new Christmas story. I remember thinking, 'The last character that came out was Frosty [the Snowman], and before that was Rudolph [the Red-Nosed Reindeer]. What else could kids relate to? A cat and a dog.'"

Rick grabbed a pencil, opened one of the blank "blue books" used in college classrooms, and fleshed out the story of Mistletoe and Purrfect. He typed it up and read it to his K/1 students.

"I would ask them, 'What does Mistletoe look like?' 'What does Purrfect look like?' and they would describe very frequently the kind of dog or cat they had at home," he says.

The book is illustrated by Danielle Schmidt, whom Rick met while she was substitute teaching at Joseph Mellilo Middle School in East Haven, at which he was working at the time. Mistletoe and Purrfect are based on pictures and descriptions Rick gave to Danielle of his grandsons' beloved pets.

He says, "One grandson has a boxer and my other grandson has a cat. I took pictures of [the cat] and Danielle looked it up and said, 'That's a Maine coon.'

"I'm a dog person not a cat person, so I made the cat the bad guy and the dog the good guy," Rick chuckles. "But they sort of reconcile in the last part of the story."

Included in the back of the book are suggestions from Rick, based on his speech and language background, for parents and teachers to use the book as a learning tool.

After some edits, Rick got the book published into the version available today. It's available for purchase as a paperback or e-book on both Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com, and can also be found at Breakwater Books in Guilford.

Family and Retirement

Rick and his wife, Janice, have two children and three grandchildren.

Their son, Matt, graduated from Daniel Hand High School in 1992 and their daughter, Kristen, graduated in 1995. Matt attended George Washington University on a voice scholarship. Kristen graduated from Cornell University and now works in human resources at General Electric.

Janice taught in Madison for many years before moving to North Haven as a guidance counselor, retiring in 2007. Rick and Janice, however, are hardly the type of retirees to sit around all day. After just a few weeks of golf lessons, Janice scored a hole-in-one at a course down in Florida, much to the chagrin of Rick, who says he has been golfing for 50 years.

"I always have to do something," Rick says. "I'm working on a couple of other books without illustrations, and then I'm planning a series of seven books with a main character called the rainbow dragon. It's a kind of spin-off of a book on bullying that I wrote after Mistletoe. I've dabbled with writing a Broadway musical that my son and I have talked about doing. It's called Captain Blood, based on the 1922 book by Rafael Sabatini, which is in the public domain."

The Wolfs are also getting ready to sell their Madison home near East Wharf Beach and make a permanent move to a house they own in Florida.

"We're 45 minutes from Disney World," Rick comments. "My grandkids are going to love it."

With his Mistletoe illustrator busy teaching at two schools in Connecticut, Rick intends to seek partnerships with skilled illustrators in Florida for future projects.

"I'm interested in joining writers' clubs and finding illustrators down there. There are so many talented people down there who are in the same boat and want to keep active."

And Mistletoe, he adds, is about more than vocabulary and visualization lessons.

"As I say in the book, this is a story for those who still believe or know someone who still believes and want to help foster that belief-because I think as long as kids can hang onto that belief, their innocence is maintained and it makes Christmas that much more enjoyable for them."

To nominate someone for Person of the Week, email Melissa at m.babcock@shorepublishing.com.