Mountlake Terrace custodian and chess coach retires

Published 9:44 am Friday, September 24, 2010

Bill Rasmussen remembers the year he coached the Mountlake Terrace High School chess team to a national tournament — and an awkward lull during his conversation with coaches from around the country.

As they sat around table during matches in Kansas City, Mo., his counterparts started talking about where they were from and the subjects they taught.

“Somebody asked me what I taught, and I said, ‘Oh, no, no, I’m a custodian,’” Rasmussen recalled. “It wasn’t rude, but they kind of went off and had their discussion. You could just see the shades come down over their eyes.”

That was in 1990, about midway through Rasmussen’s long career as a custodian with the Edmonds School District. That school year, his chess squad finished second in Washington and ninth in the national tournament, securing his reputation as one of the top high-school chess coaches in the region.

While teachers elsewhere might have looked askance at Rasmussen’s profession, it attracted little notice at home. Folks at his school were accustomed to the cheerful jack-of-all-trades who wasn’t afraid of using a six-syllable word such as “extemporaneous.”

“Kids like Bill, and he ran the chess team very well,” said Gil Comeau, a long-time Mountlake Terrace High science teacher and Rasmussen’s predecessor as chess coach. “The Terrace custodians have always been that way. They’ve been home-grown and fairly connected to the students.”

These days, Rasmussen, 61, is easing into retirement, which becomes official Oct. 1. He spent his last work day at the school this summer.

Over recent games of chess with his 80-year-old father at a Starbucks in Mill Creek, Rasmussen reflected on a job that began in August 1973. After stints at Lynndale Elementary, Cedar Valley Elementary and other schools, he joined Mountlake Terrace High School as head custodian in 1984.

Anybody could be forgiven for thinking that there were a lot of custodians named Rasmussen in the Edmonds School District. It’s a vocation Rasmussen has shared with three other members of his immediate family.

His father and original chess teacher, Ray Rasmussen, retired as Evergreen Elementary’s head custodian in 1992; his sister, Sue Rasmussen, 60, worked for nearly two decades at Scriber Lake High School before changing careers in the late 1990s. Pete Rasmussen, 49, the youngest of eight siblings, is Lynnwood Elementary School’s head custodian.

Bill Rasmussen has four grown children, though none of them have so far followed his career path.

Rasmussen attended Mountlake Terrace High after his family moved from Minneapolis in 1966. After graduation, he served in the Navy, studied history at Shoreline Community College and worked briefly in Seattle at the Boeing Co. and Bethlehem Steel Co.

When he returned to work at the high school, he had to adjust to using first names with his old teachers instead of “Mrs.” or “Mr.”

His typical day began at 5:45 a.m., turning on lights, opening hallways and checking the heating system. He kept the cafeteria tidy before and after breakfast. Then there were a couple of hours for repairs before lunchtime brought an onslaught of cleaning and policing.

“The head custodian does some cleaning and a lot of PR,” he said. “You do a lot of good deeds for folks.”

Elementary-school children always seemed willing to help. By high school, student attitudes changed. He wondered why teachers often wanted to assign detention students to work with him.

“It sends the message that work in general is punishment, that physical labor is punishment and our work in particular is punishment,” he said. “I must be really terrible – I got life.”

Some students would tell him, “I’d never want your job,” then show up a few years later to ask about job openings for custodians.

Edmonds School District employs 94 custodians. Pay ranges from about $37,000 to $44,000 per year. The job includes responsibilities for health and safety, such as earthquake damage assessment, and is technically different from a janitor.

Rasmussen’s career as a chess coach began in 1986. He described himself as a B-level player, which he said is the chess equivalent of being a brown belt in karate. His students during the 1990 tournament included three A-level players, “a couple notches down from a master, but a whole lot better than I am,” he said.

Chemistry teacher Bill Bond coached Snohomish High School’s chess team when they nurtured a friendly rivalry with Rasmussen and his players.

“That was all due to Bill, he was a great coach,” Bond said. “We’d be thinking every year, we’ve got to get ready for the Terrace match.”

A court case that originated in the Castle Rock School District in the mid-1990s helped end Rasmussen’s coaching career. The upshot was that custodians and other classified employees who work 40-hour weeks would get paid overtime for any school activities beyond their regular shifts.

Though Rasmussen said he gladly would have coached for free, the pay requirement would have sapped the chess team’s budget.

“That made it un-fun,” he said.

He stepped down in 1996, but in his office still kept chess books that he was more than willing to share. To this day, Rasmussen keeps in touch with several former players, including one who’s about to become his son-in-law.

The Terrace chess club still competes but some local schools have lost funding. Snohomish High School dropped its program in 2009. Everett, Jackson, and Cascade high schools also had teams until 2004 when the Everett School District removed support, said Allan Shell, a coach at Monroe High School and president of the Wesco league for chess.

Membership in the statewide Washington High School Chess Association has been steady for the past five years, though schools face big challenges finding coaches.

“The biggest issue is this: In the past, there was often a person in the building who took an active role in encouraging kids to play,” said Dave Ellinger, the association’s president. “When a teacher takes an interest in making the club more than just lunch meetings, then the clubs thrive.”

Noah Haglund: 425-339-3465, nhaglund@heraldnet.com.