Class Is Dismissed, but the ‘Grande Dame’ Is Not Finished Teaching

An ambulance raced to the scene of an accident on Interstate 5 south of Bakersfield. The driver, it seemed, had dozed off at the wheel and hit a guard rail. When the paramedic peered into the car and saw the uninjured driver, a flash of recognition came across his face.

“I don’t suppose you remember me,” the paramedic told Gladys Waddingham, “but I used to be in your Spanish class at Inglewood High School.”

Another former student had just encountered Inglewood’s most acclaimed former teacher.

“I run into students in bizarre situations all the time,” the 89-year-old Waddingham said recently. “I’ve had 10,000 students in my classes over 45 years. Some of them are now bald-headed.”

Waddingham’s teaching career began in 1922 and lasted so long that she now has former students who are teachers and have former students of their own.

Waddingham retired in 1967 but in a sense she has never given up teaching. Today, she is the city’s unofficial historian with a schedule busier than many who are generations younger. As one longtime friend and admirer, Brenda Conyers, put it, “She does more before breakfast than the rest of us do all day long.”

An early riser, Waddingham fills her days with meetings for the Historical Society of Centinela Valley, Inglewood’s 100-year-old First Presbyterian Church and the never-ending stream of city advisory committees that inevitably add Waddingham’s name to the list of members.

“We need 100 more Gladyses,” Inglewood Councilman Jose Fernandez said, extolling her commitment to the city.

Her home has a wall full of plaques that she and her late husband, Francis, who was also active in community organizations, received over the years. Politicians love to invoke her name in speeches, and during election time they vie for publicity photographs with Waddingham. When local officials can’t answer an arcane question about the city’s past, they refer the questioner to Waddingham.

A man from Michigan called her recently to find out where an electronics school that once operated in Inglewood had relocated. She got another call from an Oregon man trying to track down anyone who had known his mother, a city resident in the late 1950s.

“She’s the grande dame of the Centinela Valley,” said the Rev. Daniel H. Newhall, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church for the last 25 years.

Keeping the past alive for future generations is Waddingham’s obsession.

She wrote a 95-year history of the First Presbyterian Church in 1985 and updated it last year to honor the church’s centennial celebration. She spends much of her time sorting through boxes of slides and other artifacts and shipping them to universities and historical societies.

“I have to do it now because it would be a shame if all of it went to waste,” she said.

Born on a farm near Scottville, Mich., in 1900, Waddingham lived with her family in Oregon and San Diego before moving to Los Angeles to attend Occidental College in 1916. She graduated four years later as the class valedictorian and immediately began teaching Spanish in a 44-student high school in Las Vegas. Two years later, she took an $1,800-a-year job in Inglewood.

As the city has been transformed from an agricultural community to a Los Angeles suburb and from an all-white enclave to a predominantly minority city, Waddingham has worked to keep Inglewood aware of its historical roots.

In the 1970s, when residents proposed renaming Monroe Junior High School after Martin Luther King Jr., she wrote biographies of Judge Albert Monroe and 12 other city fathers to explain their accomplishments to current residents.

“I’m against renaming the schools,” she said recently. “But I can understand new people moving in and not knowing about the city’s past.”

The school board later decided not to rename Monroe or any of the other schools named after Inglewood’s founders, many of whom were Waddingham’s contemporaries.

Although many of Waddingham’s friends have moved away, she has become an Inglewood booster. One of her longtime crusades has been recruiting younger members to the historical society. Another is letting outsiders know that Inglewood has a rich history that is continuing every day.

“Not everything is wonderful about Inglewood,” Waddingham said, “but everything is not wonderful in any town.”

She has a longtime friend who used to live in Inglewood who proves her point.

“She will not come over here because she thinks it’s dangerous,” Waddingham said with a hint of annoyance in her voice. “But she’s had troubles with kids breaking the (lights) in her apartment house. The neighborhood kids around here don’t bother me at all.”