Pat Jack, one of Archbishop Murphy’s first teachers, retires

Published 11:38 pm Monday, June 23, 2008

SNOHOMISH — Pat Jack began her teaching career in the early ’60s as one of the first Peace Corps volunteers. She taught English in a handmade brick school 320 miles down a dirt road in the Liberian jungle.

In 1969, while teaching math and science in Monroe, she started one of the first high school women’s sports programs in Snohomish County.

And in the early ’80s, she joined a handful of Roman Catholics who dreamt, organized and eventually founded Holy Cross High School, the predecessor to Archbishop Thomas J. Murphy High School. As the school’s first athletic director and one of its first teachers, she helped it grow from a student body of 23 to 500.

Now she’s retiring.

Looking back on her lifetime of firsts, Jack said she didn’t set out to make history or break through gender barriers — she just did what she enjoyed.

“It just happened,” she said, sitting on the sofa in her Snohomish home. “I just did things I enjoyed doing — and they just happened to be things guys enjoy, too.”

As a child, she was the only girl in the local rock-climbing club. She surfed and played basketball, volleyball and tennis in school. She excelled in math and science.

As a high school student in La Jolla, Calif., she helped prep labs for the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries. Too young to legally work, she said she was paid from the “broken glassware fund,” the same account used to replace shattered test tubes.

After returning from Liberia, she took a research job on a boat that kept her at sea for months at a time. She said she got the job because the people reviewing her application assumed she was a man.

“I’m very grateful my parents named me Pat,” said Jack, now 66.

Occasionally, she was thwarted from doing what she wanted because of her gender.

After filling out an application and being offered a firefighting job, she was on a train heading to her new job with supervisors who were traveling aboard with all the other firefighters.

After the second to last stop — when only firefighters should have been left onboard — they realized they’d made a mistake. They kicked her off the train.

Likewise, she never fulfilled her dream of becoming a doctor because she didn’t get into medical school. In the 1960s, most medical schools accepted just a tiny fraction of women because it was assumed they would eventually have babies and leave the profession, she said.

When she started girls sports programs at Monroe High School, her teams wore handmade vests because there was no money for uniforms. Eventually one of the boys coaches gave them old uniforms and time to practice in the gym.

“The history of prep girls sports in this area is the history of Pat,” said Bill Jack, her husband and a retired supervisor for the Department of Social and Health Services.

She took more than a decade off from teaching to raise her four children. She wanted to keep them in Catholic school through high school, but didn’t want to drive them to and from Seattle each day. So she met with other parents and laid the groundwork for the only Catholic high school between Seattle and the Canadian border.

In 1988, Holy Cross High School opened in the old Our Lady of Perpetual Help Elementary School building in north Everett. The following year, Jack joined the tiny staff. She taught chemistry in a former kindergarten classroom that had a 2-foot-tall toilet in the corner and no gas for lab work. In the beginning, she and other teachers would sometimes willingly accept their paychecks weeks late until school administrators could scrounge up enough money.

The Jacks and several other couples bought the south Everett land that Archbishop Murphy High School sits on. They made monthly payments for years and donated the land for the school.

Principal Kristine Brynildsen-Smith said she can’t remember a time when Jack wasn’t a key leader at the school.

“We will miss seeing her every day,” she said. “We will miss her insights and questions at faculty meetings. We will miss her ready response of ‘Whatever,’ but her many, many contributions to this school will never be forgotten.”

Jack plans to spend her retirement traveling to remote places, meeting new grandchildren and substitute teaching. She wants to visit her son, a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic, and read philosophy and novels she hasn’t had time for.

She’s also considering working to expand a new Catholic elementary school in Snohomish.

There’s still time for more firsts.

Reporter Kaitlin Manry: 425-339-3292 or kmanry@heraldnet.com.