Life of Wry

A couple months ago, I joined Derrick and Gayna (Lamb-) Bang for their 3x/year lunch with David Calkins (and his wife Nancy) in Williams. Mr. Calkins was my favorite math teacher and I hadn’t seen him in over 50 years. Derrick was a year ahead of me at Palos Verdes High School. He also had Mr. Calkins for at least one math class and had become his teaching assistant. Derrick and Mr. Calkins got to know each other because David was the faculty advisor to the bridge club. A lifelong friendship was born.

Mr. Calkins was considered a very cool teacher back in the day… erudite, rigorous… knew his stuff and demanded a lot of his students. I thrived in his class. He’s still very erudite! I always loved math, but Mr. Calkins was probably the teacher most responsible for my applying to colleges as a math major. (I lasted one year as a math major before switching to econ and then undecided. I ultimately graduated with a degree in PE. Lol.)

Back to our lunch…

Here are a couple pictures from that day… me, Nancy, Mr. Calkins himself (!), Derrick and Gayna.

We ate at Grazella’s (a fantastic deli), which has a lot of dead animals on the wall. It’s worth noting, there was a “State of Jefferson” sign across the street from the restaurant. Only one hour from Davis, but a world away.

I kinda treasure this photo.

These are from my high school yearbook:

I learned a lot about David at this (too short) lunch, including: he was great friends with Coach Kelly! Joe Kelly was another favorite high school teacher of mine. Joe taught english, and was also a football coach. David and Joe were friends then and remained friends long past their retirements. They still correspond. Joe now lives up in Washington and is also in his 80s.

Lordy.

Derrick passed along Joe’s email address and Joe and I have exchanged numerous emails since November. He remembers me (he said, even convincingly), as he followed all the school sports programs, including (especially) girl’s track. He and Rod Flagler (also in the english department) used to serve as timers at our home meets and he recalled our successes at big invitationals and State meets. He remembered how exceptional our team was. I was thrilled (beyond thrilled) to hear this. He also recalled some of the other girls who were standout athletes in my class (like Kris, Marta and Brenda).. which, 50+ years — and probably thousands of students — later, is absolutely remarkable. He said the females athletes in my class were among the best ever at PVHS.

In fact….. here’s an excerpt from one of the emails:

Occasionally I get a great surprise. Your email is one of them! Thank you for taking the time to write and fill me in. I can truthfully say I absolutely remember you, believe it or not! And one of the reasons is that when you were running track, Rod Flagler and I used to time some of the meets when I could sneak away from football practice to help out. Yup, you guys really had some good track teams. I even worked the CIF track meets most years, and had the extreme pleasure of watching a young Jim Spillane long jump 24’ 10” at Arcadia, unheard of at the time. And yes, I remember English as well. 

You really were a “jock” before there were many quality female athletes at the high school level, and I so much enjoyed watching the women play.

How about THAT!!

Here’s Joe, who I had for Comp C:

I’ll always, ALWAYS, be grateful for that english class, because he required us to keep a daily journal (which he collected, read, and commented upon), which led me to a lifelong practice of journal writing, which led me to…. BLOGGING. Huzzah!

Joe sent me a more recent picture:

He aged well.

Finally…. as I bask in 70s nostalgia… here is a picture of our beautiful high school… and the track where I spent my glory-est of days.