Lessons From Life : Teacher’s Aide Honored at 90

Ninety-year-old Ben Rosenberg said he had to learn some serious lessons before starting a second career as a teacher’s aide 15 years ago.

“I woke up in a Canoga Park hospital on Sept. 16, 1975, and couldn’t remember much of anything after 1970,” Rosenberg said. “I was in an alcohol blackout for three, four, five years.”

So at 75, Rosenberg quit booze and began working as a teacher’s aide. So far, so good on both counts, said Rosenberg, who was honored Monday as the oldest paid employee in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“Teaching keeps me alive,” said Rosenberg, who has worked as a special education aide for the past six years at George E. Hale Junior High School in Woodland Hills. “I need a place to go to every morning. The Los Angeles school district has given me the will to live.”

Hale Principal Richard Bell said Rosenberg’s humor and consistency have enabled him to work successfully with severely emotionally disturbed students. “He’s funny, he’s very sharp, just unbelievable,” Bell said.

Rosenberg received a standing ovation after getting a commendation for his work at Monday’s school board meeting. He gave his thanks, choking back tears, and then joked, “I’ll cry at a gas station opening.”

Supt. Bill Anton, 66, told Rosenberg, “When I grow up, I want to be just like you.”

Jeffery Isaacson, 12, a Hale student, said Rosenberg is a familiar face on campus, helping students and faculty.

“I like when he helps with math because he makes it fun,” Jeffery said. Rosenberg assists the classroom teacher in helping students with their assigned tasks and occasionally directs a math lesson.

Rosenberg said he was always pretty good at math, sailing through architecture school in Illinois before coming to Los Angeles in 1936 with a family and about $600 in his pocket. He became the founding partner of what is now Gruen Associates, a multimillion-dollar Los Angeles architectural firm.

His first job in Los Angeles was to redesign the porcelain front of the F.W. Woolworth’s store on Hollywood Boulevard. “It still looks good,” Rosenberg said.

Rosenberg and partner Victor Gruen became so successful that Rosenberg sold out his interest and retired in 1951. He moved to Cannes, France, to live happily ever after, he said.

“I had a house in Beverly Hills, a house in Malibu and a villa on the south of France,” Rosenberg said. “I even married a French girl there.”

Rosenberg said his drinking progressed in the fashion of alcoholics and by the early 1960s he was back in Los Angeles, living with his third wife. He started to do classroom volunteer work at the Hammel Street School in East Los Angeles but had to quit.

Although Rosenberg said he remembers little of the years that followed, they have served as an important lesson. He said he gets his patience with students from what he has learned by participating in a 12-step alcohol recovery program.

“We have a philosophy that tells me I have to accept my students as they are,” Rosenberg said. “I can’t change them and I can’t make them do what I want by screaming at them.”

Rosenberg said he has learned that everyone--young and old--wants to be productive. If his students do not want to do a particular task, he will direct them to another one.

So far, the method has worked. Hale special education teacher Margaruite Newman said Rosenberg has been a dedicated teacher who puts in extra hours.

“He was here in the summer putting up bulletin boards,” Newman said.