Former State Legislator Turned Seventh Grade Teacher in 60's Ignited Interest In Civic Participation

(This blog was originally posted under the headline "Classroom Heroes - Memories of Mr. Angevine" on a internet website at The News Tribune, a daily newspaper in Tacoma, WA on 3/05/07 under a reader-generated section entitled "In Your Neighborhood.")

When the leaves of autumn start to fall later this year, they'll mark a total of forty years since I met Mr. Wayne G. Angevine, the very first politician that I ever knew. To be truthful, I can't say that I really knew him. I was just a kid. He was both my homeroom and social studies teacher at C.W. Sharples Junior High School in Seattle.

At the time, my classmates and I had been told that Mr. Angevine was the youngest man to sit in the Washington State Legislature. Owing to the fact voters in his former district had given him the boot, Mr. Angevine found himself instead not in the hallowed halls of Olympia, but at Sharples delivering a series of highly formal and no doubt well-crafted speeches to a class of seventh graders.

It became fairly clear early in the school year that it was particularly difficult for Mr. Angevine to have been forced to the sidelines in the prime of his life. It was a tumultuous perod in history. During that very time President Johnson declared his intention not to seek re-election, Eugene McCarthy's bright promise would sputter, and the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, we left school only to discover that every side street all around the south-end campus were totally lined with police cars.

So the former legislator was reduced to showing us his old campaign memorabilia and pacing the front of the room every day in his perfectly tailored sport coats. These sport coats were not of the same kind we saw on the backs of any other male teachers at school. Those teachers wore sport coast in muted tones of brown and gray. Mr. Angevine, on the other hand, favored more interesting colors like flame red, lightning white and powder blue. He also owned at least one coat in some kind of plaid.

To this very day, I'm unable to forget that every jacket was always accessorized with a perfectly folded and crisply pressed handkerchief folded into a chest pocket. The handkerchief perfectly matched whatever solid color long-sleeved turtleneck Mr. Angevine chose to wear that day. All his pants had perfect creases and every pair of his shoes, whether tie-on or of the buckled variety shone like a newly washed automobile.

Mr. Angevine's dark hair was always worn neatly slicked back from his forehead. Not one single brown hair dared pop out of place. He wore heavy dark framed glasses. On a few rare occasions, like the day after Robert F. Kennedy was shot to death, he showed up for class wearing sunglasses.

It appeared even back then, Mr. Angevine was channeling what frustration he harbored into a series of impassioned addresses exhorting his youthful charges not only to sit up, but listen closely to the news and issues of the day, to think about just who was getting what, when, where and why, and finally stand up for what we believed. He also asked us to think for perhaps the first time in our lives, about taking a personal role in what he said was most likely among the most noble professions in the world, that of the politician.

To that very end, Mr. Angevine arranged for us to organize under the banners of the two major political parties, to select candidates from among those who in real life were making a run, write a political platform, research, write and deliver our own speeches and turn the floor of our junior high school auditorium into a real live political convention complete with staging, flag waving, colorful banners, assorted signage, candidate buttons, speeches and floor demonstrations.

I am especially thankful to have been one of his students. Not only because he helped open our eyes as to the great big world outside of our portable classroom, but that he gave us all a chance to learn more than we otherwise might have been inclined to know about what was happening in our country. Mr. Angevine also planted a seed, the powerful idea that if we chose to become informed and involved, that each one of us had a potential (like himself) to make some kind of difference within our own communities.

I owe at least one or two subsequent chapters of my life to Mr. Angevine and the inspiration he gave forty years ago to a seventh grade girl from Seattle whose American-born parents and immigrant grandparents were among some 120,000 persons of Japanese-American ancestry incarcerated by the U.S. government during World War II.

A number of years later after I left junior high there was a story carried in the Seattle-area papers about Mr. Angevine. If I recall correctly, he tried at least one more run for another spot in the Washington State Legislature. Unfortunately, this run was followed by a small cloud - something having to do with problems related to exact length of residency in the district where he had filed.

At this point in his story, I must confess that I completely lost track of how this matter was eventually settled. But this episode, however regrettable, doesn't negate my belated thanks or the long delayed salute to which I feel he is owed.
Nonetheless, for me there will always be teachers whose names have long ago faded and teachers whose names shall be engraved in my mind. So under the subheading of politician, an unforgettable character in his own right, will always be the one and only Wayne G. Angevine.