‘Mr. O,’ the keeper of history

Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Another yearbook came home. My youngest child just finished first grade, adding a soft-cover school annual to the stack on our bookshelf. Along with funny hairdos and smiley-face signatures, those yearbooks are filled with favorite teachers, generations of them.

I’ve tried to decide which teacher most influenced me, but can’t seem to pin one down.

An English teacher’s quiet sensitivity opened my eyes to reading. A crackerjack geometry teacher had me earning A’s in spite of math phobia. Mr. Finer and Mr. Kersul – they have first names, but I can’t think of them as Gary Finer or George Kersul – illuminated my years at Spokane’s Ferris High School.

One favorite? If we’re lucky, we’re shaped by many fine teachers, with their own styles, personalities and areas of expertise. My older son, now 19, has an easier time than I do choosing just one.

“Mr. O,” he’d quickly tell you.

Mr. O is Jack O’Donnell. He is pictured with his eighth-grade class in the yearbook my 7-year-old brought home from Everett’s Immaculate Conception-Our Lady of Perpetual Help School.

Although O’Donnell returned to teaching once after retirement, it’s unlikely my youngest will ever get the chance to be in his class.

A teacher for 39 years, O’Donnell, 61, is retiring after nine years at the Catholic school. He was honored at a Mass on Friday at Immaculate Conception Church.

“He exudes being a teacher,” said Jeff Wagner, whose son, Casey, was in O’Donnell’s class this year and who spoke about the teacher at Friday’s Mass. “He was always so positive.”

When he and his wife, Peg O’Meara, would go to parent-teacher conferences for their three children, Wagner said, “he’d talk about what a joy the kids were to teach.”

“You’d walk out of there thinking, ‘Was he really talking about my kid?’ He relates to them so well. He pulls out the best in them,” Wagner said.

“He really brought history to life,” said Casey Wagner, 14, who’ll attend Archbishop Thomas Murphy High School this fall. Casey loved O’Donnell’s slide shows on Everett history. He said O’Donnell had a way of making students want to do well.

Herald readers may recognize O’Donnell as the writer responsible for compiling The Herald’s Seems Like Yesterday column.

O’Donnell’s tenure at Immaculate began after his retirement in 1997 from the Edmonds School District, where he’d taught for 30 years.

“I taught everything,” said O’Donnell, who was at Martha Lake, Oak Heights, Lynndale and Forest Crest elementary schools, Lynnwood Intermediate School and Alderwood Middle School. His focus was often social studies.

A 1963 graduate of Everett High School, he went to Everett Junior College and Western Washington University. In those years, “Vietnam was hovering,” he said. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do.”

That all changed on a single day in the spring of 1967, O’Donnell’s first day as a student teacher at Jackson Elementary School in Everett. “I loved it,” he said. “It was the most deciding day of my life.”

O’Donnell passed his abiding interest in local history to my son, who can’t take a ride around Everett without commenting on some old house or old neighborhood that “Mr. O” used to talk about. From the same source, my kid knows more than most about vintage neon signs.

“I was always into maps, geography and history. The literature came later for me,” O’Donnell said. “I think writing is important, and reading. The reading makes the writing.

“I have always thought, with kids, you have to try to reach that burning interest that they have. And most kids have one,” he said. “Sometime around eighth-grade, they may be quiet about it, but that interest will be there. Whatever those things are, have them go for it.”

With his interest in U.S. history, O’Donnell catches himself imagining how he’ll work the places he’ll see on his retirement travels into classroom lessons.

“I love teaching,” he said.

He retired on Friday. Since then, he’s been to Everett’s View Ridge Elementary School, where his wife, Mary Ellen, teaches kindergarten.

“I was just out there,” he said Tuesday. “I did a little slide show for the third-graders on Everett history.”

Retirement, huh?

Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.