Instructor Teaches Again as Storyteller

During his early days, Charles Feinberg, 79, believed books “were my magic carpet to the future.”

“Those nights were ever so long and we didn’t have television then,” said the retired Columbia University history teacher who spends two and sometimes three days a week telling stories and reading books to kindergarten through sixth-grade students at Whittier Elementary School in Costa Mesa.

His change from college students to children is the result of a push 12 years ago from his wife, Helen, a school nurse in the Newport Mesa School District.

“She told me, ‘Why don’t you get off the chair, look around and find something to do. Come on down. You can teach people,’ ” he recollects.

It seemed to be an awakening call.

“This is such a joy to me,” he said, though he never had thought he would end up reading to kindergarten students. “The last 12 years has been the highlight of my life.”

Despite his lifelong penchant for reading. “I had never read a child’s book,” he said. “I didn’t know how or where to begin.”

Instead of reading books page by page, Feinberg defines the story and then dramatizes it to help children learn, appreciate and love words. “It’s nonsense just to read,” he said, “It’s marvelous when kids can play with words.”

But there is a down side to his fun days at the school.

“Every year I get a new group of kids to love and I give them love, open love, especially to the latchkey kids. It’s something they need,” he said. “Sometimes I see despair and it tears me up. But I never show them my tears.”

And that includes tears from his own ailments and miseries, including a bout with cancer which he won.

“I had too many things to live for and to do,” reasoned Feinberg.

If he was to agitate for anything in the classroom, “it would be for hope. To give them hope.”

In earlier days he agitated for equality, sometimes carrying protest signs with protest groups throughout the country.

“I was an activist,” was his simple explanation. He is an ardent supporter of Israel.

To this day, Feinberg remains a voracious reader.

“I have 10 books on my desk that I have to get into,” said the eloquent Newport Beach resident, who was recently honored by KNBC for his years as a reader volunteer at the school.

The only survivor of 11 sisters and brothers, he credits his late mother, Rebecca, for his drive and motivation to study history.

“My mother would push me to seek out the truth when I studied history,” he said. “She always told me not to accept the word of other people and would say, ‘Did he really say that?’ ”

The idea of tracing facts in books “lead me to the merry path of history that showed me the harvest, the wine and the tulips, and I have tasted them all,” he said.

“It’s like ice cream. You taste them all.”

Sylvia Peterson, who writes for the Golden West College newspaper, The Western Sun, was a semifinalist in the America Express College Journalist of the Year competition.

In fact, the 42-year-old grandmother was the only semifinalist to represent a community college, the other 10 award winners being from universities throughout the nation. The overall winner is from New York.

Peterson’s entries in the contest focused on prostitutes, guns and the homeless.

“When I do a story, I go to streets and get to the gutter,” said the Huntington Beach woman, who went on a number of police ride-alongs to cover her stories. “I’m not afraid to go anywhere or ask anyone anything.”

Besides working for the college newspaper, Peterson also managed to graduate from the school’s Criminal Justice Investigation program.

She said her next move may be a switch from print.

“I’m thinking about going into broadcast journalism,” she said. “I want to be the Mexican Oprah Winfrey.”