GREAT NECK, N.Y., March 30 — The substitute teacher in Room 216 was pacing, searching for the right touchstone to help an eighth-grade social studies class in this mostly white, affluent community comprehend the sting of racial discrimination.

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The Substitute

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Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Arnold Blume between classes at Great Neck North Middle School.

“O.K., have any of you ever seen the TV show ‘All in the Family?’ ” he asked.

Some of the Abercrombie-clad 12- and 13-year-olds looked up from their dog-eared three-ring binders. Some studied their cuticles. One girl tentatively raised her hand.

Arnold Blume, 81, their teacher for the hour, dressed in pressed gray slacks, a pinstriped button-down shirt and a midnight blue blazer, scanned 20 faces like a captain searching the open sea for a speck of land. He dropped Archie Bunker and tried another tack.

“Does anyone know what a restrictive covenant is?”

No takers. Finally, Mr. Blume and his temporary wards found common footing on a patch of narrative ground where every human, it seems, can stand: “Let me tell you a story about when I was young,” he said, and every young face turned to listen. It is Mr. Blume’s trademark.

On any given day in the United States, about 274,000 people report for work as substitute teachers. Mr. Blume, who retired in 1983 after 29 years teaching English and social studies and has generally substituted four days a week at Great Neck North Middle School for the past two decades, may or may not be the oldest.

But it is safe to say there are not too many people who have taken attendance, led the Pledge of Allegiance, spoken the words “boys and girls,” handed out a bathroom pass or asked for undivided attention and gotten it as often as he has.

He is no beleaguered sub from Central Casting. He has never had to call security. He does not even have to write his name on the blackboard. Everyone knows Mr. Blume.

In a school where the average age of the teachers is under 40, and the students’ grandparents include many of the baby-boomer cohort, Mr. Blume has emerged as a sort of older person in residence, an on-call doctor of memory.

He is the only person in the building, for instance, who remembers the shantytown Hooverville that once blanketed Riverside Park at 72nd Street. He talked about it the other day in Miss Mostrande’s eighth-grade social studies class.

He is the only one who had ever heard of, much less laid eyes on, a sign that said “No Jews, No Negroes, No Dogs Allowed.” He explained how that felt on another day in Ms. Andersen’s eighth-grade English class.

He is the only person whom Lena Ferreira, a 13-year-old eighth grader, ever met who can tell you what it was like listening to the radio with his mother the day Franklin Delano Roosevelt made that inaugural speech in which he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

“He made me love social studies,” said Angelique Dedvukovic, 13. “A lot of kids don’t know how life used to be harder. He tells you about how it wasn’t always like this. Because he lived through it.”

Barbara W. Andrews, North Middle’s principal, said Mr. Blume had carved out a niche at the intersection of teaching and oral history. He may not follow lesson plans as much as some would hope, and he has been known to talk a little too much about himself, she said. “But Arnie brings something to our school that no one else brings,” she said. “He gives the kids a sense of the reality of the past.”

In an eighth-grade English class studying “A Raisin in the Sun,” Mr. Blume talked about a trip to Miami Beach in 1941, when the police knocked at the door in the middle of the night and ordered his family housekeeper, a black woman, to leave the all-white hotel. (His whole family left.)

In seventh-grade Spanish, Mr. Blume moved seamlessly from a confession that he cannot speak Spanish to a tale of the European sabbatical he took in the 1960s with his wife and two children, then 9 and 6, where they visited Spain and learned to love the siesta.

And in a seventh-grade science class, where the lesson called for a review of DNA facts, Mr. Blume reviewed some DNA facts. Then he told the story of searching for the family of his biological father, Wolf Garfinkel, who left when Mr. Blume was 6. (He took his stepfather’s name.)

Walking between classes, he received shout-outs in the hall: “Hey, Mr. Blume! Are you coming to my class today? Hey, Mr. Blume! Will you tell us a story today?”