The Journal article identified him as a retired high-school English teacher. It's not known for attracting people who drink their own pee. In fact it's been my observation that some teachers are simply too clean-living and polite to actually emit anything as pungent or concentrated as urine. The most useful of us are cheerful deliverers of Integrated Curriculum, turning out cooperative, collaborative, compliant American citizens. Not those exceptions like Bill Broyles.
Some guys just care too much about their subjects to collaborate nicely.
But the ones who make a difference in kids' intellectual or creative lives are the ones who live intellectual or creative lives, who specialize in a field and live for their specialty. He took real-world experience to the writing classroom. As a teacher, Bill modeled writing. He taught kids how to move from that amorphous longing to write to the concrete construction of realities with words. Too bad there aren't more of them.