WJ English teacher Jon Bos.

Literature teacher Jon Bos would sit facing his class atop a desk, legs folded, drawing his students into the enchantments of one or another of the masterpieces that were his life passion; a novel by Edith Wharton or Cormac McCarthy, perhaps, or a Shakespearean tragedy or verse by Walt Whitman.

Over the years, teaching five classes a day, Mr. Bos inspired thousands of students in AP Literature and other English courses at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, Md. He taught with boundless energy and contagious excitement. Mr. Bos died on March 19 in a Baltimore hospital of injuries sustained in a car crash. He was 51.

On news of the tragedy, nearly 1,200 students, colleagues, and other admirers swamped an online website https://www.caringbridge.org/ to lay down written tributes to Mr. Bos. It was an astonishing outpouring of grief and admiration.

His students, colleagues and friends described Mr. Bos as a 21st Century Renaissance man. A voracious reader and book collector, he endlessly nurtured an encyclopedic intellectual intimacy with the world’s novelists, poets and playwrights. He was an attentive listener, sensitive counselor, dedicated father and husband, meticulous gardener, disciplined environmentalist, wise-cracking dinner host, ingenious mix-master, and inveterate gift-giver (often passing on an obscure Graham Greene volume or a Bob Dylan CD). 

Asked which authors Mr. Bos most favored, colleagues and students recited lengthy lists, many overlapping. Those included James Joyce, Flannery O’Connor, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ernest Hemingway, Ian McEwan, the Irish novelist Roddy Doyle, Michael Chabon, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova — not to mention Shakespeare. 

He spent family vacations prowling used bookstores from New York to Florida for as-yet-unread works. At his family’s rambling Howard county farmhouse, where Mr. Bos lived with his wife Renee and son Zack, dozens of shelves groan beneath thousands of books, including a 22-volume commentary on the Bible by the French theologian John Calvin, and the complete works of Mark Twain. More are boxed in the basement.

“He wouldn’t say he’d read all of them – he just wanted to,” Mrs. Bos said. 

Jonathan Edwin Bos was born on Sept 24, 1968 in Richmond, Va. His father, a trombonist, led choirs and church ensembles and taught music. His mother was a classically trained pianist.

Because Mr. Bos was born with a heart defect, his infancy and youth involved a series of critical surgeries. Doctors catheterized his heart when he was a newborn, and followed with three open chest procedures before he was five. When he was 16, they inserted a pacemaker. They later opened his chest for eight additional surgical procedures over the years before giving him a donor heart in a transplant operation when he was 31.

His mother ignited his love of books by reading aloud the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and others to Mr. Bos and his two siblings, Mark and Cindy. Even as a child Mr. Bos began lugging books around so he could read everywhere — even sometimes on elevators.

During the 1970’s, he attended kindergarten through eighth grade in several public and Christian schools in Silver Spring. He graduated from Eleanor Roosevelt High School, in Greenbelt, Md., in 1986. Mr. Bos attended college at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, graduating in 1990. 

In the early 1990’s, Mr. Bos pursued graduate studies at American University, working as a security guard in the library to obtain a tuition reduction. After obtaining his masters degree in 1995, Mr. Bos got a teaching job at Montrose Christian, a private K-12 school in Rockville, Md. His classroom adjoined that of another teacher, Renee Dillon, then 22. Mr. Bos sent students into her classroom, bearing flirtatious notes, stapled discretely shut. Soon Mr. Bos and Renee were dating. Marriage followed on January 31, 1998. During a New York honeymoon the couple visited the Metropolitan Museum, the New York City Ballet – and of course the Strand Bookstore.

During their first years of marriage, Mr. Bos was awaiting a donor heart. Surgeons carried out a successful transplant on September 5, 1999. Almost immediately Mr. Bos’s color improved and his energy strengthened. He returned to full-time teaching in January 2000 at High Point High School in Beltsville, Md., where he taught through June 2004. In September 2004, Mr. Bos began teaching at Walter Johnson High School, a large, prestigious public school that today has 2,800 students and some 130 faculty members. 

In the 2019-2020 year, Mr. Bos taught Advanced Placement Literature, Creative Writing, and Honors English. He also taught a class focused on the student literary magazine, the Spectator, and was faculty adviser to the forensics club, recently coaching student orators to a first-place finish in Montgomery County’s forensic competition.

Mr. Bos was a powerful teacher because of his intense relationship with the literature he taught, former students and colleagues said. He loved Emily Dickinson so much that he told his students they could only call her Saint Emily, or Ms. Dickinson — they were not allowed to call her Emily, he said, because they didn’t know her well enough.

“He loved every book he taught us,” said Thalia K. Patrinos, a student in Mr. Bos’s 2009 AP Literature class who is today a digital contractor to NASA. Another of Mr. Bos’s strengths was his acute sensitivity to student emotions, she said. “He noticed things. One time he asked if he could talk to me after class. He could tell from my essay that I was upset. He was like – ‘Hey! Let’s talk about it.’ He was always cognizant of where people were at.” Ms. Patrinos said she remained friends with Mr. Bos after going to college and entering the work world.

“Jon has supported me through everything,” she said. “Every breakup. Every move. Every job change. Every loss. Every death. He has always had my back, always ready with good advice — and a book to lend me.”

Mr. Bos made his own fascination with books contagious.

“Going into 11th grade, I had completely lost all hope in caring or even learning about English since reading books or even writing essays was tedious for me,” Michael Kashani, a former student, wrote in an online tribute to Mr. Bos. “This all changed the moment I walked into his class on the first day. I knew there was something special with him and could feel at ease in his class.”

Bill Griffiths, a colleague of Mr. Bos’s in the English department at Walter Johnson, described Mr. Bos as a careful listener.

“If he asks me what’s going on and I get into something he’s not as familiar with as I am, he cocks his head and …makes you the total focus of his attention,” Mr. Griffiths wrote in a tribute. “How rare is this?”

“But, when you talk about one of the many things he loves, oh my!” Mr. Griffiths continued. “Even if you thought nobody loved the subject more than yourself, you realize Jon has lived inside of that topic for many more hours than you. And, still being a good listener, he never wrenches full control, but nourishes a wonderful conversation for as long as he can.” 

Mr. Bos also shared wonderful conversations with his son, Zack. When Zack was a child, Mr. Bos frequently read books aloud, including Goodnight Moon and Harry Potter. When Zack grew into a teenage athlete, “there was not a soccer game or track meet that Jon missed,” Mrs. Bos recalled.

“Zack was the miracle of Jon’s life,” she said.

 At the family’s farmhouse in Dayton, Mr. Bos loved to garden, can pickles, and even mow the lawn, she said.

Mr. Bos made such a positive impression on people that he was asked to officiate at six weddings. In the first, in 2006 at a mansion in Maryland, Mr. Bos wed one of his American University graduate school classmates, Ladd Everitt, to Robin Boyce. His last came in June 2019, when he officiated in Vermont at the wedding of his cousin Emelia Dillon to Harry Fishbein. Upon the couple’s return from a Greek honeymoon, they found waiting an invitation to the Bos farmhouse.

 “Was Greece super great?” the message from Mr. Bos said. “When are you guys coming out? Cucumber Tom Collins are being made and consumed regularly.”

Mr. Bos attended services at Cedar Ridge Community Church in Spencerville, MD, Mrs. Bos said. She was asked the denomination. What kind of church is that?

“The kind that loves gay people and collects organic food to give to homeless shelters,” she answered.

Mr. Bos not only kept faith with his spiritual life but also with his social conscience, demonstrating against Trump Administration policies. In July 2019, Mr. Bos, Mr. Everitt and a third friend carried protest placards into the crowd at a presidential rally on the Washington Mall. They were spit on and screamed at by Trump supporters, Mr. Everitt said. “Jon did it like everything else he did, with confidence and bravery. He was not the kind of guy who talks but doesn’t walk — he walked the walk.”

Mr. Bos is survived by his wife Renee and son Zack, 19, of Dayton, Md.; brother and sister-in-law Mark and Bonnie Bos of Highland, Md.; sister and brother-in-law Cindy and Andrew Carmichael of Charleston, S.C.; father Jim Bos and his wife, Donna, of Apex, N.C, and his loving extended family. Mr. Bos’s mother Margaret passed away in 2007.