Excerpt from Fall 2010, "The Story of T.J. Vassar '68"

LAKESIDE FALL | WINTER 2010

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T.J. VASSAR ’68

How he changed Seattle & this school

A ONE-OF-A-KIND JOURNEY SHAPES A ONE-OF-A-KIND LEADER

by CAREY QUAN GELERNTER photographed by TOM REESE

When Vassar was elected student-body president in September 1967, he told Tatler, “I would like to tell all students to be leaders, but alas it would then be a case of too many chiefs, and chaos would thrive. Therefore, let me say in all modesty, ‘I am your leader.’ Let your thoughts be mouthed through my lips.”

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HE JOURNEY OF T.J. VASSAR is on one level a classic up-by-the-bootstraps story: smart, poor boy gets elite education, makes good. But the real story is more complex and layered.

It’s his individual story, a Seattle history story, and a Lakeside history story. His life parallels the city’s civil rights era and is a piece of it.

He was one of the first African Americans at Lakeside, came to manhood in an era of ferment at Harvard University, and brought his ideals back to Seattle to effect change. He became a household name as a charismatic Seattle School Board leader, led the battle for busing for desegregation, got disillusioned with politics, and came back to Lakeside to push for the kind of education he once envisioned for Seattle public schools. And in so doing, changed Lakeside as profoundly as it once changed him.

He would be the key to transforming Lakeside from a school for the children of the privileged, to one where more have a place at the table and the promise of equal opportunity.

He has an unusual capacity to live in many worlds, without giving up his roots. He has been a bridge between the working class and the elite, to the benefit of both sides. Education as a means to an end has been the thread running through his life, and the goal of his leadership.

This spring he announced that he had pancreatic cancer. The news has brought on reflection—in the larger community, on how much history is tied up with him, his impact on education,

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and both how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go. And at Lakeside, reflection on how much the school depends on him.

But as he is quick to remind everyone, he’s not done yet. He’s still pushing his goals—for education, for social justice.

CHILDHOOD: A world of black and white

Vassar, born in 1950, grew up a few blocks from Garfield High School, in a modest frame house where his mother still lives. Money was tight but his family, which included one older brother, considered itself fortunate. His mother, a preacher’s daughter, had vowed as a child she’d leave segregated Oklahoma.

She moved to the Northwest after she got a war industry job, and later worked as a riveter for Boeing. His gregarious Mississippiborn dad, always ready with a homily for every occasion, had been a boatswain’s mate in the Navy, proud of running a small vessel at a time when the Navy’s discriminatory practices restricted most black men to work in the kitchen, “which he refused to do because he did not want to serve white people,” Vassar says. Then he worked for years at Bethlehem Steel Mill. At the time, these jobs were among the best available to all but a small percentage of Seattle’s African Americans.

Vassar says he never met a black professional until the day when Charles Z. Smith, a lawyer who would become a State Supreme Court Judge, came to speak at Washington Junior High. ➢

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He recalls, “My world really did not include many white people,” other than the whites at school, a family that ran the corner store, and one elderly recluse down his street.

The Vassars lived in the Central Area of Seattle, as did 8 out of 10 African Americans in 1965, because of economics, discrimination, and a legacy of redlining and restrictive covenants elsewhere.

Even as a child, “T.J. was an unbelievably charismatic, forceful individual,” says Bob Henry, a Lakeside history teacher, who recalls that Vassar and Henry’s younger brother Wayne were among the few black males in their academically advanced class at Leschi Elementary, which was 89 percent black. Henry’s mother, Mary, a librarian, was among the civil rights activists who protested the Central Area’s inferior, de facto segregated schools.

Though an avid reader, taught early by his father, Vassar says he wasn’t a great student. He didn’t know how to study and didn’t really have to. He knew how to get along with both teachers and students, which made people like him, which got him the reputation of knowing how to get things done, which led him to volunteer, or be volunteered, for everything from student government to school plays.

To him it was fun, and he liked to have fun. His older brother, Kenny, was the rebel; Vassar liked pleasing his parents and adults in general.

Vassar was such a star that at 14, his science teacher at Washington, Bill Maynard, recruited him to speak about “race relations” at a school in Aberdeen, Maynard’s hometown, where the kids had never met a black person. Vassar soon had them at ease and laughing.

Maynard, who’d later become director of desegregation for the Seattle School District for a time, was among the teachers who recommended Vassar when, in 1965, Lakeside came to several inner-city schools recruiting for the new, free summer program called LEEP, or Lakeside Educational Enrichment Program. They sought 60 boys who might thrive after getting a boost with math and English lessons, along with sports and camping. Vassar liked the idea of something to fill a boring summer, and “I knew nothing about Lakeside but I knew what free meant.”

Contrary to what many believe, the LEEP students would not be the first students of color to come to Lakeside. Dexter Strong, who began as head of school in 1951, wrote in his 1985 memoir that the first was a Korean refugee, causing quite an upset (he gave no date or name, but it seems likely this was Kyum’Ha Lee ’59), and later came two Japanese American brothers, Paul Suzuki ’55 and Robert ’59, which, he says, created no stir.

Strong arrived at Lakeside intending to admit some “Negro” boys, he wrote, and by the late 1950s, he enlisted Seattle’s Urban League to set up a meeting with a small group of black professionals, including “Dr. Henry.” That was Mary Henry’s surgeon husband, Dr. John Robert Henry, Jr. However, Mary Henry corrects Strong’s account that a Henry son subsequently attended Lakeside: The Henrys instead decided to gain access to better schools by having a white middleman buy them property in an all-white subdivision of Seward Park. The trustees’ minutes of April 1963 indicate that Lakeside accepted “its first negro student” for that September; however, there is no trace of such a student in school records.

LEEP was Lakeside’s first substantial effort at integration, a response to the Civil Rights movement that was making bigger and bigger headlines in Seattle and nationwide. By 1963, Seattle had begun a voluntary district-wide desegregation plan, the first major city in the U.S. to do so, and activists continued to push for greater integration. Strong kept tabs on a pilot summer program launched by ➢

PHOTOS FROM THE JANE CARLSON WILLIAMS ’60 ARCHIVES

Vassar appears with other student-body off icers in a school pep rally in 1967. At right is then-Head of School Dexter Strong. At left, Peter S. Banks ’67.

Vassar, who cut quite a f igure on the Lakeside campus wearing his signature bowler hat, was on the seesaw during a break from working at a class community-service project at an elementary school.

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the National Association of Independent Schools in the Boston area in 1964, then gave the go-ahead for LEEP. Scholarship money was set aside for the two top LEEP graduates to enroll at Lakeside in the fall. Near summer’s end, the LEEPers were given a test, and Vassar and Floyd Gossett were tapped. An anonymous donor provided the money for a third LEEP student, Fred Mitchell, who would come the second semester. The three would become Lakeside’s first African-American graduates.

Dale Bauer, then a LEEP teacher and today an Upper School art teacher, recalls there was never doubt that Vassar was their top pick: “He was a natural leader; that’s what sold us on T.J.” Vassar was elected LEEP’s student body president, and he had a way of getting everybody to think that new and different things were fun.

But at first, Vassar couldn’t see the advantage of coming to Lakeside full-time–it was too far north, and it had no girls. But Dan Ayrault, then LEEP director and Upper School head, wouldn’t take no for an answer, and on the third entreaty, Vassar figured if they wanted him that much, he ought to accept.

Ayrault, later head of school, would become one of Vassar’s mentors for life. They would work together when Vassar joined the Lakeside Board of Trustees in his 20s—as the first African American—and Ayrault would later suggest that Vassar head his own community-based school for inner-city youth, planting an idea that Vassar would eventually pursue.

LAKESIDE STUDENT YEARS: Learning to work it

On the first day of school that fall, Vassar worried he’d be beaten up by the white boys on the school bus. He instinctively sank down into his seat as their bus stopped to pick up students in Broadmoor, telling Gossett, “we’re not supposed to be here,” as the gated community was off limits to blacks. Gossett reminded him they’d be on that bus route all year, “so we might as well sit up.”

Trying to reach out, a number of their classmates’ families invited them over to lunch and dinner, first “asking staff members ‘what did we eat?’” Gossett recalls, “as though we didn’t eat the same things as anybody else!”

In class, the students had to stand up and read aloud from Huckleberry Finn, with its frequent use of the “n” word. A stricken Vassar was not sure if the white boys reading were “embarrassed or relishing” saying the word openly, but would put his head down on his desk. “We followed that book with Native Son, where a black guy chokes and kills a white girl,” he recalls.

Vassar tried hard to straddle the different worlds, and to find a way to navigate, a skill he would continue to hone. When Huckleberry Finn finally drove Gossett, already agitated from name-calling and harassment, to lash out, Vassar pulled him back.

One day, Gossett recalls, “T.J. pulls me aside and says, ‘Let’s go to the gym.’” He retains a vivid image of exactly where the two 15-year-old boys were in the locker room, the sun streaming through, when Vassar laid it on the line: “He said, ‘You can’t leave me by myself here. Cool your jets a little bit so you don’t find yourself out of the school.’”

“T.J. was always good at listening and figuring which way he had to go to walk through the Lakeside maze,” Gossett 20

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says. And he could also “talk his way through stuff. There was only one strategy that would work at Lakeside; he was going to have to work it, he knew that, that was the whole basis of our conversation that day in the locker room.” ‘Work it’ meant, in part, using humor, lightening things up. “That was pivotal,” Gossett says. After that, “I just chilled, and thought, ‘just let me get through the school.’”

Academics were another challenge. Vassar, Gossett, and Gary Asaka, another student of color who entered that year, were all top students in their respective Seattle junior highs, Washington, Meany and Mercer, but initially struggled. “I remember sitting in class many days listening to the teacher and not understanding anything he was saying,” Vassar says. “His references, vocabulary, and manner of speaking just did not register.”

Things eventually got better. The first semester the school wouldn’t allow the three LEEP grads to play sports, to give them time to transition, but once they could play they won admiration for their skill on the fields and courts, and friendships grew, many of which continue to this day. And the harassment mostly ended, though sports brought its own rough times, as Lakeside played in a league that included small towns on the Olympic Peninsula, where catcalls and slurs from the stands made for some scary moments.

A racial incident that hit Vassar hard was when The Bush School would not allow Fred Mitchell, who’d been invited by a white girl, to attend its prom. Vassar and Gossett pushed for Lakeside administrators to fight Bush. Lakeside would not, and Mitchell did not go. However, Vassar says, they did succeed in getting Lakeside proms moved from The Rainier Club, which at that time did not accept blacks or women for regular membership.

Mitchell, who has since died, was more integrated socially at Lakeside, while Vassar and Gossett would often head to Garfield after Lakeside classes ended. Vassar’s older brother, Kenny, would be there. T.J. still hung out with neighborhood friends, most of whom eventually got into trouble with the law—drug dealers, hustlers, pimps. When, years later, he worked in a program to help ex-felons turn their lives around, he saw many of his old friends at area prisons. He figures he might have landed there, too, except for the influence of Lakeside—though Kenny, who did go down a wayward path for many years, says he’d have never let his brother get too far into that world, and anyway, “his heart was never in it.”

With heavy sports schedules, they began to spend less time at Garfield. Vassar became captain of the baseball team and then co-captain of the football team. By senior year, he was so popular he was elected student body president. His campaign speech had even teachers cheering, as he referenced a Booker T. Washington speech and promised he would fill “the hole in your soul!”

Then came the watershed event of Stokely Carmichael speaking to 4,000 at Garfield High in April 1967. Accounts tell how Carmichael, who led the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee and would popularize the term “black power,” galvanized Seattle’s black community. “I was mesmerized,” recalls Vassar. “I had never heard anyone talk like that in person. Stokely talked about taking the white man’s foot

off his neck by any means necessary.” He talked about “black is beautiful, he was dark-skinned, too, and I thought, oh, my God, what have we been doing to ourselves?” At church, and in the speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he heard about turning the other cheek. Now, “I felt like a veil being lifted from my face and I could finally see clearly. I thought, I understand!

That feels right! Turn the cheek when somebody’s kicking your butt, no way! I was not going to allow somebody to humiliate me and then turn the cheek. In fact, I would fight fire with fire.”

Vassar had always seemed to others the picture of self-confidence. Since childhood he’d been pushed forward, at church, at school, because he was so well-spoken. But, he says, “There was some real racial inferiority that I felt. Lakeside exacerbated some of that, too. Because when I came here, I really enjoyed my experience and everything here was white, and everything here was the best. And so I began to speak more like the people out here, I tried to take on more of a white persona here. I even told my parents—and my mom almost killed me, she almost yanked me out of here—that I didn’t believe in God anymore; it was this Lakeside science/logic/don’t-use-religion-as-a-crutch.

But it was because in my community, the houses were shabbier, people didn’t have as much money, they were not as educated, they didn’t speak as well. We all knew that old saying, “If you’re white, you’re alright. If you’re yellow, you’re mellow. If you’re brown, stick around. But if you’re black, git back!”

Hearing Carmichael’s speech “was the moment that brought all of the self-hate that I had been living with to the forefront so that I could see it for myself.” His feelings were shared by most in the audience, says Metropolitan King County Councilmember Larry Gossett, Floyd’s cousin, who would go on to organize the University of Washington’s first Black Student Union.

“Before that night, there were few victories and we didn’t think much in general of ourselves,” Larry Gossett says. “We had low self-esteem reinforced by our public school system.”

But “99 percent of the people who came to the speech calling themselves Negroes left proudly calling themselves black,” says Gossett—Vassar included.

It would take more time, and especially the influence of the woman who would become his wife, to change Vassar’s mind about the role of violence and how to go about social change. But as he would say later, his young self never would have listened.

HARVARD YEARS: 100 miles an hour

In fall 1968 Vassar headed to Harvard University, to a campus buzzing with anti-war, anti-apartheid, social-justice activities, and intellectual ferment. He quickly plunged in, particularly the movements for Harvard to divest from stocks that supported the South African apartheid regime, and to establish an Afro-American Studies program, which the college did, in time for Vassar to graduate as a major.

The black students on campus were drawn together by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. the spring before they arrived as freshmen, recalls Vassar’s college roommate and lifelong friend Plemon Whatley, who would later rename himself Plemon T. El-Amin and become the imam, or spiritual leader, in Atlanta of the largest U.S. Muslim community, known for his interfaith work. El-Amin recalls that “everybody was moving at ➢

PHOTOS FROM THE JANE CARLSON WILLIAMS ’60 ARCHIVES

Lakeside was still an all-boys school and boys were required to wear jackets.

Vassar’s checkered jacket was too big for him, because it was his father’s.

Vassar, in center, as a junior on the football team in fall 1966. The next year he would become team cocaptain.

Vassar in McKay Chapel with, at left, the late E. “Laury” Lawrence Minard III ’68, and at right Jon Stein ’68.

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Floyd Gossett ’68 and Vassar in the locker room where, at age 15, Vassar called Gossett in for a “pivotal” talk. Vassar, worried at Gossett’s anger over harassment, advised him to cool it before he got thrown out of school. “ You can’t leave me by myself here.” Things got better after they joined sports teams and made friends. The two, along with Fred Mitchell ’68, now deceased, were the f irst three African Americans to graduate Lakeside.

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100 miles an hour; it was 8 hours of study, 8 hours of social, 8 hours of protest; what we didn’t do was sleep.”

And the action on campus was not enough for Vassar. Once again, he would straddle two worlds: in this case, the college world, and the world of the surrounding black community. Relations between “town and gown” were not good, recalls Vassar’s wife Lynda, then Lynda Hughes, who grew up in workingclass Cambridge and had protested when Harvard took over neighborhood land. For a Harvard student to come into the neighborhood housing projects, Lynda says, “It was like crossing territory. T.J. crossed the lines.”

He had initial entrée into the neighborhood as Lynda’s friend.

They’d met at a party. The Harvard boys had been specifically warned to date only college girls, no “townies.” Lynda had always wanted to go to college, to become a nurse, but she’d had to work to support her family from a young age; she was assistant to the mayor of Cambridge.

Before long Vassar moved into the housing project with Lynda and their apartment became “homework central” for neighborhood kids that Vassar met playing basketball. When one junior-high-aged kid challenged him to fight, he figured out the boy’s real problem was that he couldn’t read, and taught him how with comic books. During a strike against the Cambridge public schools, he organized his Harvard friends to run “the Cambridge Liberation School” to teach kids for the duration.

Lynda became the caretaker of the college students, feeding them, making sure their political activities didn’t eclipse their need to study. She reminded them that they were on scholarship, and had one chance to make it. If they went too far, got too radical, occupying an office or demonstrating, they might get kicked out.

For Lynda, Vassar “became my job.” Plemon, too; he’d moved in with them, to save money. You might think she would resent that they had chances she didn’t. But she says she didn’t see it that way.

“I finally met some people of color that were experiencing an educational environment that I always wanted. I felt I was in a positive atmosphere ... I knew they all had goals, which was good. People in my neighborhood never talked about goals, maybe a few.”

Vassar credits Lynda’s maturity, and the fact that they soon had two children, with stabilizing him. “I was too radical with everything back in the ’70s,” Vassar says. “Without doubt, marrying Lynda was the best thing I have ever done.”

SEATTLE COMMUNITY: The Rainbow

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After graduation, in 1972, he and Lynda brought their young daughters Mikelle and Asha back to Seattle (a third child, son T.J. III, would be born later), putting down roots in south Beacon Hill, where they soon bought the house where they still live today. Vassar began working on a master’s degree in public administration at the UW, and got jobs for the next decade in community-based organizations: the Central Area School Council; the Seattle Urban League as director of education; Seattle Public Schools, first for a multicultural education program nicknamed Rainbow, later as a researcher. He began learning about grassroots politics and who the “players” were, in the Central Area, different ethnic communities, and in Seattle at large.

It was at Rainbow that he really forged his notion of multicultural education, as “unity through diversity.” Rainbow, officially ➢ T.J. Vassar

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Vassar’s entry in his 1972 Harvard University yearbook (which has his birth year wrong). He plunged into the campus’s anti-apartheid, antiwar, social-justice activities, including leading a move to create an Afro-American Studies major, graduating in its f irst class.

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afloat, but it would be 10 months before he’d finally get a job, after a Seattle Times reporter wrote about his plight.

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named the Ethnic Cultural Heritage Program, was headed by Mako Nakagawa, who became one of Vassar’s mentors. “We were young and idealistic,” says Nakagawa.“The entire mood of the country was black is beautiful; I was saying, yellow is beautiful, too.”

When Vassar was first interviewed for the associate program manager position, the other staff challenged him to name prominent local Asian Americans. Nakagawa laughs recalling his response: “There’s Ruby Chow, and Ruby Chow, and uh, Ruby Chow,” referring to the well-known ChineseAmerican restaurateur. But he learned quickly that in a city such as Seattle, you had to reach across ethnic lines to get anything progressive done. One of his proudest moments when he would later become a School Board member was to push through, in a close vote, redress, including compensation, for Japanese American women who had been forced out of their school-district jobs during World War II for no other reason than their ethnicity.

The ’70s marked the dawn of the multicultural education movement. There was a rawness to the times, reflected by “my brash and horrible period,” Nakagawa says, when she required all her staff to make “I statements.” She went first: “I spent my first years as a child prisoner behind barbed wire fences in an American concentration camp.” She exhorted Vassar to “say something more about black anger, justified anger. I’m yelling at him, ‘you’ve got to be mad!’ and ‘you’re not black enough!’”

Vassar got mad alright, but at Nakagawa. Today, they both laugh at the memory, and Nakagawa says, “It was totally my fault. I was asking for something he wasn’t. He’s not blind to things, not denying them. But he’s not angry. He feels grateful he was given an avenue by which he could circumvent what other people had to go through. Like his brother,” who would become a heroin addict for years before finally kicking the habit and becoming a drug and alcohol counselor (“and my hero,” says Vassar). “He has sympathy and compassion.”

When Vassar was running for Seattle School Board Nakagawa was asked what his greatest asset was: “I said he’s a loving person who really cares about people.” Asked for his weakness, she said, “It was the same thing.”

Vassar was working as a researcher for the school district in 1981 when he wrote a letter to the editor exhorting someone to run for the school board who was knowledgeable and dedicated to the education of children. His letter convinced him to run himself. He quit his job, because board members can’t also be district employees. Lynda, working as an administrative assistant at the Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic, kept them 24

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THE SCHOOL BOARD YEARS : A popular politician

But win he did, stumping for more academic rigor, teacher accountability, tracking student progress, and desegregation.

He was endorsed by a wide range of people, from movers and shakers in ethnic communities, to Democratic politicos, to the Associated Republican Women. He was rated “outstanding” by The Municipal League of King County. He was 30 years old, the youngest ever to be elected to the school board.

He would serve twice as board president, and bring a visibility to Seattle schools not seen before or since. In part that was because desegregation and education were such a focus then, in Seattle and nationally. But the other part was Vassar’s likable, outsized personality: the huge laugh, appealing looks, gift of the gab. Says Larry Gossett: “He was one of the most creative and colorful politicians that served in our community in the last three or four decades.”

He was constantly in the news, and even had his own radio program talking up Seattle schools. As younger daughter Asha Youmans ’89 recalls, “It took an extra hour just to pick up a gallon of milk at the store, because he knew everybody in the community, and everybody wanted to talk to T.J.” It became a time of controversy and battle, with a citizen initiative to stop busing that the district took to the U.S. Supreme Court to oppose, and won; a bitter 19-day teachers’ strike in 1985 that unleashed threats of violence against him; some weak and problem superintendents. Vassar was the lightning rod.

But Vassar effectively used his charisma—and sense of fun—to forge alliances. “He could work with board members despite their ideology. That made him effective,” says Larry Gossett. Members like Michael Preston, who disagreed with him on most issues, notably busing, but remained his friend, describing him as “always at the upper echelon of the brain trust of the African American community.”

And Ellen Roe, a staunch opponent of affirmative action in hiring and busing who created a brouhaha when she infamously gave the Lake City News her anti-desegregation argument: that her privileged grandchild had nothing in common with “a child whose mother is a prostitute in Holly Park … who doesn’t know anything except the inside of his own scruffy house.” But they were personally friendly and also worked together to push for higher academic standards, such as requiring a 2.0 GPA for students to participate in extracurricular activities, and for being “firm with employee evaluations” as a critical means for school improvement. When Vassar censured Roe for her statement to the newspaper and cut her out from some committee assignments, he got pilloried for not punishing her enough, notably from the African American community.

Echoing Preston, Elizabeth Wales, who also served on the

His Harvard proctor told students not to date “townies” but Vassar disobeyed after meeting Lynda Hughes, who worked to help support her family and couldn’t afford college. He soon moved into her Cambridge housing project. He credits Lynda with keeping him grounded when “I was too radical with everything in the 1970s. Without doubt, marrying Lynda was the best thing I have ever done.”

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board with him, says that “his political skills were mostly his personal warmth and goodwill, and his evident care for the kids.

That’s what swayed people, how he brought votes together.”

And he remained just-plain-folks. “You get in these positions and sometimes people are puffed up,” says Wales. “But T.J. wasn’t puffed up, but he was a big personality all the same.”

In a way his weakness was the same thing as his strength, Wales says: “he wasn’t an operator”; he took a principled position and stuck to it. Perhaps more operator-like maneuvering would have been useful at times, such as in the teachers’ strike, she suggests.

Michael Hoge P’11’14, the district’s lawyer who successfully argued against the anti-busing citizen’s initiative before the Supreme Court, notes that the decision for desegregation actually wasn’t a board initiative: It went back to 1977, when the mayor, city and church councils, and the business community achieved a consensus that rather than facing a court-imposed busing plan, like almost every other city, they’d voluntarily come up with their own. Vassar was one of the plaintiffs for the district’s case, as a parent with children in Seattle public schools.

The guts of Hoge’s winning Supreme Court argument, he says, was that integration is an integral part of a good “basic education in terms of preparing citizens to be citizens in a democratic and competitive marketplace” and busing to make desegregation possible was therefore a necessary cost. And this was the idea that Vassar “sold” to much of the community at the time, and would continue in later years at Lakeside.

But by the time he was finishing his second term in 1989,

Vassar was discouraged. He likens the school district to a bowl of Jell-O; “I didn’t change it, I smacked it and it wiggled a little bit.”

After one of the last board meetings, he told The Seattle Post-Intelligencer that desegregation wasn’t the hoped-for panacea because the district wasn’t making an equally strong effort to improve the instruction kids got at the end of their bus rides. The real problem, Vassar said, was a lack of political will.

“There is just no accountability to the community in the Seattle schools,” he told the P-I. “Inferior teachers are transferred, not fired.” He blamed in part the poisoned relationship between teachers and the administration: those teachers, justifiably, didn’t trust administrators based on past unfair behavior, but reacted by protecting incompetent peers in rigid union-backed seniority systems.

The story reported that Vassar was furious on finding out that the administration had, for “budget reasons,” sidetracked an accountability program that would have shown school-by-school breakdowns of how well students were learning basic skills.

He decided to move on, he says, because “I felt I failed. It was time to let someone else try.” Today, looking back, he says, “I was too young.” He could have taken some different tacks to persuade teachers, he thinks; he shouldn’t have listened so much to the professional educational establishment.

Mandatory busing ended more than a decade ago, and last fall the Seattle School Board unanimously voted to return to a simpler, cheaper, and more predictable alternative of assigning students to their neighborhood schools—in a way, a reluctant endorsement of separate but equal, though it’s still trying to ➢ T.J. Vassar

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COURTESY OF DENSHO, THE KINOSHITA FAMILY COLLECTION, 1984

Vassar called it one of his proudest moments when in 1984 he pushed through a resolution for redress, including compensation, for women forced from Seattle School District jobs during World War II due to their Japanese ancestry. Vassar and two redress activists, his mentor Mako Nakagawa, to his left, and Cherry Kinoshita (now deceased), directly in front of him, posed with four of the former employees: top left, Alice Kawanishi and Ai Koshi; at right, May Namba and Toyo Cary.

COURTESY OF MICHAEL HOGE P’11’14

Seattle School District board members in 1982 at the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled for the district in its case against a voter-approved anti-busing initiative.

Michael Hoge P’11’14, the district’s chief counsel, based his winning argument, in part, on the importance of racial desegregation in schools. From left, Vassar, Hoge, Michael Preston, and in front, Barbara Beuschlein, Suzanne Hittman, Cheryl Bleakney, Ellen Roe, Richard Alexander.

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get to equal. Many board members said segregation in Seattle neighborhoods is a societal problem too big for the district to solve on its own.

But the underlying issues Vassar pinpointed have not gone away. And many of Vassar’s ideas about standards, accountability, and tracking student progress are now echoed by the Obama administration, with its controversial Race to the Top competitive funding initiative, aided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a cadre of reform-minded educators, and by the current superintendent of Seattle Public Schools.

Vassar, perhaps, was in some ways ahead of his time.

So what is the legacy, Vassar’s legacy, from those years?

Some say school desegregation, with all its bumps, was an important force that gradually brought ethnic groups that lived in separate worlds to a growing familiarity with one another, helped promote greater integration of many Seattle neighborhoods and a less isolated, provincial city.

Vassar also was one of the early successful black Seattle politicians who won trust and created a comfort level among whites, Larry Gossett notes—paving the way for others, like himself and former Seattle mayor Norm Rice, as well as Ron Sims and Gary Locke, both of whom have gone on to positions in the Obama administration.

Quintard Taylor, the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor of American History at the UW, an expert on the history of blacks in the American West, and author of The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle’s Central District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era, points to an “ambiguous, complicated legacy” of busing and more broadly an ongoing discussion of school integration in Seattle.

Among the mix of negatives and positives, he says that busing brought greater awareness of previously denied or ignored inferior education in communities of color, an important “first step” though it didn’t solve the problem.

Busing triggered white flight and ultimately middle-class flight, which led to greater isolation for poor people of color stuck in the worst, most segregated schools, Taylor says—but many children of color benefitted from the greater opportunities to move to neighborhoods with better public schools.

Taylor concludes: “You can make the argument, and I wouldn’t be on the other side, that busing was a huge failure.

It disrupted families, affected schools negatively, affected race relations negatively. You can also make the counterargument, that without the busing controversy, Seattle would have been a different place, and not as good … T.J. Vassar is part of that legacy… Even though we’re not perfect, I believe the people of Seattle are better because of that debate and that discussion.”

Vassar had run initially for school board with the intention of using it as a door into politics, and thought he might ultimately run for Seattle City Council, and maybe later, mayor.

He announced he was considering a run for the council.

That he would have won, no one doubts.

“He was a gifted politician, and he had all the ingredients: The fact that he got the best education with the wealthy and influential, but comes from the black working class masses— and he’s comfortable figuring out ways for all those things to work together for the benefit of the more disadvantaged folks he sees himself representing,” Larry Gossett says.

“T.J. could have gone on and run for city or county coun-

Seattle School Board members Vassar and Ellen Roe, at left; Susan Haris, center, and Superintendent Robert Nelson, listen to talk for and against mandatory busing at a 1986 board meeting. Vassar served eight years on the board, from 1981 to 1989, and was twice president, in 1985 and 1989. A strong proponent of busing, Vassar was known for his ability to work with those who disagreed with him—including Roe. BENJAMIN BENSCHNEIDER, THE SEATTLE TIMES, 1986

cil, mayor, county executive, Congress. And he would have been successful.”

Adds Preston: “He didn’t have any negatives in terms of his own political capital. He was one of those transcendent figures, even if you didn’t agree with him, you liked and supported him.”

But Vassar changed his mind. He was getting out of politics.

Education was still the thing he thought mattered most, and “I thought to myself, if you really want to do something, you need to be one of those people who are really working with kids on a more hands-on basis.” Today he has no regrets, he says. “I think I was right about that.”

Dan Ayrault had talked to him about a school he thought Vassar should head. A community-based school, housed in public spaces, aimed at inner-city youth. The idea intrigued him but the timing didn’t seem right; he had a young family. His family responsibilities were no less encompassing than his public ones.

His children say he monitored their homework, read all the books they were assigned along with them, edited their papers; “find me my red pen,” he’d say. All three would go on to do well.

Mikelle graduated from Rainier Beach High and UW. Asha transferred from Rainier Beach to Lakeside in her sophomore year, then got a degree from University of California, Berkeley. T.J. III transferred from Rainier Beach to Lakeside in his senior year, and also graduated from UW. Today Mikelle is an appraiser and real-estate agent, Asha’s a teacher, T.J. III a manager at Microsoft.

It wasn’t just his own three kids he coached; Lynda’s sister came from Boston for a better life, along with her eight children and two dogs, and lived for months with the Vassars.“He was the father or most beloved uncle for all of them,” Asha says,“and still is.”

The principal idea didn’t die. After Joseph Olchefske

became superintendent in 1999, Vassar told him the one job he would take was as principal of the African American Academy, which had opened as a model for educating black children in 1991 but had a troubled history. He worked out a plan with James Kelly, whom he’d help hire as director of the Commission on African American Affairs. His idea was for a school “something like LEEP,” emphasizing “motivation, inspiration; community service,” with rigorous academics. Black culture would be the draw, but he thought he’d also draw from the many Asian students already living in the community, too.

Olchefske turned him down. Olchefske would resign under pressure in 2003. The African American Academy woes continued; it was among the schools the district closed in budget cuts last year.

LEEP DIRECTOR YEARS: Inspirational kid magnet

He was not looking for a job when in 1992 he chimed in about what a new LEEP director should be like. He was working for the Private Industry Council, in a program to help ex-felons, and Gov. Booth Gardner ’54 had tapped him to be the chair of the first Washington State Commission on African American Affairs, so he was also busy working with activists and politicians statewide to increase employment opportunities.

When Lakeside’s then-Head of School Frank Magusin unexpectedly offered him LEEP directorship, though, he realized that, after his frustrations with bringing change to public schools, he welcomed the chance to return to Lakeside. “I relished becoming a part of a strong school community that was also familiar to me.”

Magusin, now head of The Bush School, left shortly thereafter and Vassar’s first day was also the first day of a new head of school, Terry Macaluso. ➢ T.J. Vassar

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LEEP was about to expand to provide year-round enrichment and support to graduates of the six-week summer programs until they graduated high school. Lakeside had received a large donation for this purpose from the Nintendo Corporation, which had been under pressure from local civil rights activists.

Since there’d never been a full-year LEEP program, Vassar got to make up his own job. History teachers Jim Gaul and Bob Henry were the two main LEEP teachers then, and he kept much of what they’d put in place, including the “three pillars of respect, risk taking, and active participation.” But they’d been pushing for a more rigorous academic component and stricter rules, and Vassar agreed.

It was Vassar’s “inspirational, kid magnet” personality that built up and made the program successful, says Macaluso.

LEEP was initially not endowed as it is now. “There were years when nobody was looking at LEEP, it was ‘the summer program, that’s lovely,’” but Vassar changed that, says Lakeside music teacher Phyllis Byrdwell. “He nurtured it like it was one of his babies. He’d prod you to come in and help as a teacher.

I don’t know if there could have been anyone else who would have devoted as much time to it as T.J.’s done.”

Daughter Asha recalls that the LEEP message to students was the one that her father conveyed to his own children: “You can hold on to your culture as tightly as you want and still be a smart person. You’re not betraying anything by being educated and navigating through what others might see as a white world.”

And he had a message for parents, too, Vassar says: “One of my goals was to make public school parents dissatisfied with a poor education by having their students experience education that was superior, akin to showing them a glass that is filled with clean water, rather than a glass filled with dirty water.”

“T.J. was the first guy here, the last guy to leave. He was involved in absolutely everything; he was very good at being the out-front guy, glad-handing, but he’d also be sweeping the floors,” says Gaul, who was at one time Vassar’s assistant as well as teaching full-time.

A 2001 study by an outside research firm showed that LEEP students in Seattle Public Schools had a higher rate of graduation, 90 percent vs. 79 percent of students with the same ethnic makeup. Among African American pupils the difference was even greater, 85 percent vs. 73 percent of their non-LEEP counterparts. During three years sampled, LEEPers had an average combined GPA of 2.87 vs. 2.67 for all Seattle Public Schools graduates. Lakeside will be doing an updated study this year.

Vassar wanted to make LEEP a model for Seattle Public Schools, which is its partner (middle-school counselors recommend candidates and the district awards high-school credit to LEEP graduates). He was disappointed the district didn’t exhibit greater interest.

But people in the community took note. “He’s been able to pioneer piloting work on how you best educate low-income students of color, along with some talented white kids who wanted to get into the LEEP program,” says Larry Gossett.

“There have been so many inner-city youth, over the years, that have been inspired, motivated, as a result of that particular summer. So many rave about the academics, the exposure to 28

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how to learn, the value of learning, the quality of instruction.”

Youth who went on to become teachers, lawyers, engineers.

Two years ago, Zinda Foster, who’d been his longtime No. 2 at LEEP, put together a scrapbook of testimonials from grads; they’re peppered with the phrase “I’ve taken the high road” to describe the paths they’ve since taken, from the phrase Vassar always preached: “Take the high road, stay off the low road.”

Youth like Aleithe Donovan Love, today a crime scene photo lab specialist and happily married mother of two, who recalls that her LEEP summer of 1993 was the one that turned her against bad-influence kids who could have derailed her. “The experience was one I’d never before witnessed. Everyone had pride for education, growth, and goals. In public school it wasn’t cool if you want to be the smart kid or actually want to learn something, but after LEEP, I realized, I didn’t care anymore. I had the confidence to be okay with doing well.” And

As part of his duties as diversity director, Vassar has been a sounding board for many Lakeside students of color, including, here, Emile Pitre III ’96. Pitre went on to become a chemical engineer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

HARLEY SOLTES, THE SEATTLE TIMES, 1995

like microbiologist Tumnoon Charaslertrangsi, a PhD candidate studying food safety; his “Stand and Deliver,” the solo presentation each LEEPer must give to their 80 LEEP peers, was his “stepping stone to becoming an adult” back in 1995. He promises: “One day, I will dedicate myself to the society just as T.J. has done.”

DIVERSITY DIRECTOR YEARS: Interesting times

When the school’s diversity director left, Vassar took on that job, too, through the summer of 2008, when he handed over the LEEP reins to another LEEP and Lakeside grad, Latasia Lanier ’90. Lynda says he probably never would have left LEEP, except it got too hard at his age to sleep on the ground on the camping trips.

As director of diversity and multicultural education, Vassar became a catalyst for the monumental transition of the school

to one that was less insular and idiosyncratic and more diverse.

It was not an easy road, with recalcitrant faculty, culture clashes, and highly visible community controversies along the way.

Today, the numbers tell some of the story of progress: Students of color went from 24 percent in 1998-1999 to 47 percent today, faculty of color from 9.2 percent to 17.2 percent.

What the numbers don’t tell, gets into what Vassar still hopes to accomplish, with the time he has. More on that later.

There’s no question, say dozens of faculty and administrators at Lakeside, that the school would look nothing like it does today without Vassar. He succeeded in ways that would have been hard to imagine in the school’s early days as the province of white, old-money Seattle—and probably only because of his unique combination of skills, personality, community prominence, and history with the school.

As Floyd Gossett says, “Parents felt comfortable because ➢ T.J. Vassar

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JANE CARLSON WILLIAMS ’60 ARCHIVES

Vassar promised he’d shave his head at the LEEP graduation in 2002 if every LEEP student fulf illed all the requirements to graduate—which all did.

JANE CARLSON WILLIAMS ’60 ARCHIVES

In this 1996 photo, Vassar applauds during a daily LEEP community meeting, when Snickers bars are tossed out to reward and acknowledge students who’ve done something to reflect LEEP values of “staying on the high road,” actively participating, and respecting themselves and others.

TOM REESE

Lynda and T.J. Vassar surrounded by their three children, from left, Asha Youmans ’89, T.J. Vassar III ’94, and Mikelle Page.

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they knew his name from the School Board” and as a Lakeside grad and former trustee “he wasn’t an outsider. He knew the school, the school’s character, and what it embodies. He had known them or known the families for years. Plus when he got there, our classmates had children then at the school, legacies. That made it better.”

At the same time, he kept his feet firmly planted south of the Ship Canal, and that helped the school, too. (He says suburban life “has no appeal” though some of his children ask, “why do you guys still live in the ghetto?” He even persuaded several Lakeside faculty to move into his south Beacon Hill neighborhood, despite its 15-mile distance from Lakeside, telling them, “It’s a good place to raise kids.”). His ties, and credibility, opened doors for Lakeside with movers and shakers in ethnic communities who viewed the school warily, and with disadvantaged kids and their parents who trusted him because he’d “been there.”

In the parlance of Upper School Director Than Healy’s Leadership for the Modern Era senior elective class (see related story, p. 35), Vassar was the opposite of the highly authoritarian, efficient, directive leader, and instead is “high relationship” and “instrumental.”

“Most independent schools are chasing ‘little d diversity’ (the numbers). ‘Big D’ diversity is—once you do that, how do you get everybody to work together in a heterogeneous rather than a homogenous community, where assumptions of what does and what doesn’t go may not be commonly held?” Healy says, “T.J. would admit this, if he could have a little more ‘directive’ in him, a spreadsheet knocked out, things in on time, he’d be even more equipped for the challenges he’s facing. But if he were an authoritarian leader, we wouldn’t be where we are now.”

Head of School Bernie Noe calls him a “servant leader,” a concept gaining currency as effective for today’s world. Such leaders are individuals of character, empathy, and compassion, who lead by moral example and collaboration, and who are systems thinkers who put people first.

Vassar took over the diversity director job on the heels of the 1992 Multicultural Assessment Plan, an evaluation by a National Association of Independent Schools visiting team, which questioned the school’s commitment to diversity on various fronts, including curriculum and support for students of color, with criticism focusing mostly on the Upper School. Henry, who’d earlier been part-time diversity director, had sought the evaluation but found it unbalanced and blamed backlash by “the national diversity mafia” angry at his bringing Shelby Steele, a black conservative, to Lakeside for a professional development day.

But while they would later disagree philosophically, Henry endorsed Vassar as being perfect for the new fulltime diversity job—the multicultural report had included the expansion from part-time to full-time diversity director among its recommendations.

Rather than diversity, though, Macaluso was focused on basic survival challenges: getting the school’s finances in order, dealing with deteriorating infrastructure, and establishing

businesslike policies to replace a culture in which everyone had reported directly to Ayrault, the former head of school. Her job was made more difficult, she felt, because of widespread resistance from the faculty. “The level of tension was fairly constant,” she says. “Anything connecting to the 21st-century world was invasion.”

Macaluso felt “there was a very strong cultural club atmosphere at Lakeside; I was never part of that club; I didn’t want to be, that wasn’t my role. T.J. was and wasn’t,” which she felt enabled him to both see things objectively and “translate” insider thinking for her.

Vassar became a trusted ally who she felt shared her mindset of wanting to “get to the bottom of things and if there are problems to solve them. We didn’t pull any punches with each other.”

Macaluso accepted his tutelage about diversity because she knew she had a lot to learn. Says Vassar: “In 1992, the expectation was that students would fit into the Lakeside culture. There was no expectation that the school would incorporate the culture of its students as a part of school culture.” He hoped to change that.

“Some people felt like Lakeside was supposed to reflect the tenets of wealth and a classical education,” he says. “The operative part of that classical education is the root word class. If a newcomer’s behavior did not conform to the behavior that community veterans felt was proper, then the newcomers were not considered to be Lakeside material.

“In fact, it was customary to hear faculty use those very words to describe black students who were experiencing difficulties at Lakeside. ‘So and so is just not Lakeside material.’

This phrase is seldom heard now. That phrase, however, said volumes. The adults who said it were freed from the responsibility of actually teaching these students …And of course it was a declaration that ‘these people’ were alien to the school, visitors who did not really belong.”

Macaluso, who now heads Eastside Preparatory School, says she couldn’t move as far as both she and Vassar would have liked. “T.J. was very patient and impatient, both in the right ways,” she says. “He kept pushing hard for conversations, and for a broader understanding of the adults in the school, of what it means to bring students of color into an established culture. It was not a matter of finding the ‘right black kids’ to fit into our existing culture. It was a matter of our learning how to deal with the diverse population of students.”

Even, Healy says, “stylistic things; a simple example: what’s an appropriate volume in the hallway, or classroom? There are implicit rules … but not all kids and adults hold that assumption.”

“The great talent T.J. has, is that he understands how complicated it can be,” Macaluso says. “That’s what I meant about patient. He takes people as far as they can go, then he goes back and tries again. Because people had confidence in him, he could make more progress than anyone.”

Vassar didn’t blame her for the slow pace; as he’d say later, “Diversity is messy, especially the initial push for added diversity; messiness, controversy, lawsuits and hot emotions are likely to manifest themselves during diversity efforts. This is not the atmosphere to develop the school’s fundamental support structure.”

After that structure was in place, including a major capital

campaign, Noe came in 1999 as a strong proponent of diversity. That meant Vassar no longer had to advocate for it the same way, and he appreciated that Noe had “the clout to make things happen, like making sure we had a non-European language taught here, like making sure department heads hired a person of color.” Noe says Vassar helped him learn what more subtle “Northwest-style” racism was about, versus the more “in your face” style of Noe’s former city, Washington, D.C. The two men meshed in many ways and sometimes butted heads.

Vassar, for example, argues for Seattle-style everybody-in-thetent consensus-seeking, while Noe says “I’m not a big process guy … I did come to appreciate that his way of working is highly effective.”

What became the major turning point was the hammering out of the school’s new mission statement in 2003 which listed diversity as an essential component of excellence in education.

Under both heads of school, Vassar was everywhere, out front and also behind the scenes, working on many fronts tackling issues of broadening the curriculum, recruiting faculty and students of color, counseling students having trouble adjusting to Lakeside, and faculty who weren’t quite sure how to work with them. He gave professional development workshops on diversity, he was advisor to ethnic student- support groups called “affinity groups,” spoke to classes about class, race and gender issues. He represented Lakeside at conventions; he promoted the school with families of color and community organizations. He hosted home dinners for faculty of color to be able to vent about issues of racial isolation. “I just kept the discussions going.” On the national level, particularly among independent schools, he became the recognized voice of authority on diversity.

And at Lakeside, his people-sensitive counsel was sought on issues beyond diversity; whenever the school was mediating something difficult or important, Noe wanted him there. As a director, a member of the school’s top leadership team, he is part of all decision making. “He is one of the most respected people in the room,” Noe says.

They were “interesting times for me” the next two decades, Vassar says.

His skills were brought to bear whenever issues cropped up around perceptions of stereotyping, unequal treatment, or slurs.

In the incident most often cited over the years, in 2003, a white student voiced the “n” word in class and the teacher didn’t follow up with the stricken black student present, perceiving him to be over it—until his angry parent called, upset that her child felt unsafe. In characteristic fashion, Vassar wrote the teacher (no longer at the school), blaming himself first for “not doing everything I could to provide better assistance for you … to manage such a situation” and described how the teacher should have responded and why, noting he was “not trying to be hard here, just real.”

There was the Dinesh D’Souza incident in 2006, when the speaker was “‘disinvited” because his divisive ideas on race were ultimately judged “harmful” to Lakeside’s “current efforts to be an inclusive community.” In a faculty meeting, Vassar said some of the parents’ vitriolic reactions were expressing white suprem- ➢ T.J. Vassar

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the story of

Vassar was honored in August at the Northwest African American Museum at an event hosted by former Seattle School Board members Elizabeth Wales, Susan Haris, and Marilyn Smith, former district counsel Mike Hoge, and Carver Gayton, founding museum director. In the crowd were all the board members Vassar served with, three former superintendents, and many

acist attitudes, which Noe thought an administrator shouldn’t say.

“He thought for me in my position to say such things would cause more racial stratification. It would mean white people would look at me in a different fashion if I characterized their speech as white supremacy.” But,“That’s what I felt I had to say.”

As time went on, the issues tended to produce less heat, and more light. Black students in 2002 came to Vassar upset at having to deal in class with the “n” word in Huckleberry Finn.

Vassar never asked for the book to be axed, though he believes it’s better taught to college students. He did talk to the students and classes, and asked teachers what educational purpose the novel was meant to serve, and whether another could do as well without causing the same harm to students.

The teachers had been wrestling for some time with the issue; Vassar’s questions pushed them toward a conclusion, says Anne Stavney ’81, then English department chair. Unlike in Vassar’s school days, she says, the teachers always told their classes upfront that the “n” word would not be voiced aloud, and discussed the word and novel in historical context, including the history of race as a cultural construct and debate over teaching the novel. But they realized, “It still came down to, what does it feel like to sit in the class and have that word on the paper? Not just for African American students, but for all students. Do the benefits outweigh the costs? No, they don’t.”

Stavney, a nationally respected scholar and former university professor of African American literature (and who is 32

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white), led the department to revise the curriculum the next year, removing Huckleberry Finn (though they still read some Twain) while adding Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, a powerful, acclaimed novel with some of the same key elements–among them, Southern regional sensibility in the post Civil War period, and focus on everyday people and language. The new choice also provided the voice of an African American woman who has inspired many important American contemporary writers.

One of diversity’s benefits, Vassar says, is how it encourages everyone to rethink “why is it we’re doing what we’re doing?”

Looking back, Vassar says he’d do a few things differently.

White people hate being called racist, almost as much as blacks hate the “n” word, he says. He made a white colleague whom he considers a friend cry when he told her an action against a student was race-based and wrong; he should have been gentler, he says now. Things were even tougher with black colleagues when they didn’t agree.

Vassar thought that the “Brotherhood” and “Sisterhood” student-support groups based on race (called “affinity groups” at Lakeside) were helpful. Henry, who as diversity director had formed the group for black male students in order to foster academic bonds, had become disillusioned when the groups became social and in his view, “counterproductive ultimately to their success” by positioning blacks as victims. (Henry’s since somewhat softened his view.)

other school district and political f igures, including Metropolitan King County Councilmember Larry Gossett, at center in left photo, and to his right, Roscoe Bass, retired Garf ield High principal. During Vassar’s board days, the museum was the site of a standoff as activists occupied the former Coleman School demanding a museum, with Vassar among the board members who resisted moves to have the police intervene. At right, Vassar addresses the crowd, calling them all “heroes” who worked for kids.

Vassar found their disagreements, which were highlighted in the Tatler, painful, given how few black males there were on campus, though he says Henry’s “independent thinking” made him a better administrator.

Worse were several discrimination lawsuits by black faculty (one such suit remains). Vassar has previously made this comment: “It is even more difficult to disagree with a person of color and tell them that I did not think they were being singled out because of their race. Racial solidarity was the main tool, sometimes the only effective tool, black people had to combat discrimination and racial prejudice. It is very difficult to break those race bonds in an environment that is predominantly white. It brings up all kinds of Uncle Tom racial ghosts. It is very scary to make those judgments because to be wrong about either one of them would be devastating to the people involved and to myself.”

Vassar, as both diversity director and the school’s highest ranking African American, had the tough job of being the school’s public face, speaking to the press. He tread a delicate line, with lawyers on one side, his credibility in the community on the line, and a strong desire to play the role of “bridge,” and to educate the Lakeside community.

In 2007 The Seattle Weekly reported his response: “Administrator T.J. Vassar acknowledges that ‘Lakeside is not an easy school to be in’ for anybody—but especially for African Americans unused to the private-school culture ... Vassar adds,

TOM REESE

‘That might feel like: Why are you singling me out? And quite frankly, we haven’t had a lot of teachers of color, particularly in our upper school. And our families may not have had people of color instruct their kids. This is something we have to get used to on both sides.’ ” He labored mightily to resolve issues short of lawsuits, says Byrdwell, “to negotiate and put stuff in proper perspective, both for them and the school; he’s to be credited, and I don’t think he has been, for keeping things as sane as they were.”

Did all that take a toll? “Probably,” he says.

But then this self-described optimistic, “glass half full” guy comes back to those numbers he’s proud of: of students racking up more awards and higher test scores while the percentage of students of color doubled; of LEEP grads substantially bettering their performance back at their public schools.

And he points to the goals he still hopes to reach: hiring more faculty of color; recruiting more students with culturally diverse backgrounds; monitoring whether students of all genders and ethnic groups are thriving relatively equally; and forging more partnerships between Lakeside and public schools, for the benefit of both. “Lakeside is doing great now; I have a burning desire to see public education improve” and spread the tenets of Lakeside culture: high expectations, diversity, and a sense of responsibility for others at home and abroad. “I know you can change schools for better; the Lakeside story is a story that can be replicated in other places.” ➢ T.J. Vassar

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Vassar with teachers Bob Henry, at left, and Gray Pedersen in the middle, reprised a performance of the 1958 song “Three Cool Cats” for a 2005 school assembly that they’d cooked up earlier in that year for a fundraiser to benef it people harmed

by Hurricane Katrina.

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JANE CARLSON WILLIAMS ’60 ARCHIVES

Moments later, he circles back to the toll of the journey he’s taken: “When I think about the toll thing, I’m not even sure.

Just living takes a toll. I guess I’m looking at my parents, what they went through…

“My thinking was, this place showed me a completely new world. I went to Harvard, for God’s sake. I had one of the best educations on the face of the planet. Who gets a chance to do that? Your father’s a steelworker and your mother works at Boeing in a production line, you grow up in 34

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this little city. You get a chance to rub shoulders with some of the people who eventually become some of the greatest minds. It doesn’t happen to many people. I’ve had a really blessed, fortunate life.

“Lakeside was the thing that got it going. It was the place that defined me, in so many ways. What are you going to do?

You’re going to give it all you’ve got.” ■ Carey Quan Gelernter is communications associate at Lakeside School.

You can reach her at carey.gelernter@lakesideschool.org or 206-440-2706.