Students Honor Teacher With Almost a Century of Memories : Reunion: Mary van Dam, 99, taught in Poway over a five-decade span and authored a book, which is the story of her life and Poway’s history.

Arie DeJong arrived in Poway--and in Mrs. van Dam’s fourth- fifth- sixth-grade classroom--in 1949, speaking not one word of English.

For Mary van Dam, it was a challenge. She spoke no Dutch, and her husband spoke only a few words of it. There were only about 400 or so inhabitants in the Poway hills and valleys back then, and not one of them was “foreign” until DeJong, his parents and his nine brothers and sisters arrived from Holland.

“People looked at us like we came from the moon,” DeJong recalled recently. “But not Mrs. van Dam.

“She took me and tutored me, after school and during class. All the time,” DeJong said. “Pretty soon I was speaking pretty good English.”

“Mrs. van Dam was a very good teacher,” said DeJong, who now heads a family that owns the Hollandia Dairy in San Marcos. “She changed my life.”

His schoolboy crush has lasted more than 40 years.

In a recent interview, Mary van Dam shrugged off the memories of those 1940s language lessons. They were just a few days in her 99 years of living.

“I’ve had a very commonplace life,” she said. “There is nothing much to tell.”

But Gordon Stuart, who wrote the preface to Mary van Dam’s book--”As I Remember Poway”--in 1983, thought differently. He wrote:

“As a rule, the people who make history do not write about it, and the people who write about it do not make history. Mary is one of those rare individuals who has done both!”

She wrote about her life in the early days of Poway and about the people that she had known while growing up and going to school there. And she wrote about the children she had taught in Poway’s first elementary school and about her friends and neighbors. She wrote about her life and those around her, and she produced the first and only history of the place she holds in her heart.

Today, Mary van Dam’s mind is clear as a bell as she sits in her tiny room in an Escondido retirement home, autographing copies of the second printing of the book, which is the story of her life as well as the history of Poway. It takes only a little nudge to set it ringing with nearly a century of memories.

Mary Frank and her sister, Elsie, started their schooling in the one-room Bernardo School (near what is now Lake Poway) late in the 19th Century, and walked the 3 or 4 miles to class in all but the worst of weather.

“There were all grades from first to eighth, and the school day was from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.,” she wrote in her autobiographical history book. “When I fell asleep at my desk in the afternoon (I wasn’t 6 years old yet), Miss Clay (the teacher) would cover me with the apron she wore in the classroom.”

In later grades, she recalled, she went to the larger (but still one-room) Poway school across from where the old Community Church stands today.

“Inside there were rows of desks, graduated in size from front to back and fastened to the floor. Some of them were double desks for the younger children,” she wrote. “There was a slightly raised platform in front with a teacher’s desk and also a pump organ. There were three tall windows on either side of the room with blackboards in between.

“Also there was a blackboard on the wall in front and wall maps which could be pulled down out of their cases; these were mounted above the blackboards. A stand for the large dictionary and a school clock on the wall completed the furnishings. A bucket of water and a long-handled dipper stood on a bench at the rear of the room.”

With her crystal-clear descriptions, Van Dam re-created those early Poway days, describing how, when the school well went dry, the upper-grade boys earned 25 cents a barrel hauling water from a nearby farm and how, at her eighth-grade graduation ceremonies, “we drove to the exercises in a two seated spring wagon and we were late.”

She was to have read the welcoming address and recalled her embarrassment at having missed her cue because of the family’s late arrival, and finally giving her welcoming address midway through the ceremonies.

“Of course there was applause, but how embarrassed I was at being late. Things might have been even worse though, for we found out later that a spot had been burned in my ruffled graduation dress, evidently caused by a spark from my father’s pipe, which he smoked on our drive to the program.”

After two years at San Diego State Normal School (now San Diego State University), she received her teaching certificate “which was issued by the County Board of Education at a cost of 2 dollars,” and began teaching in 1912 in a one-room school near Del Mar where “enrollment was minimal and attendance was irregular” before returning to her beloved Poway, where she taught at the Merton School for three years, living at the family ranch and saving her money to buy a Model T Ford.

That Ford took Mary Frank to Imperial County in 1916 to teach for $90 a month and to meet her husband-to-be, Ed van Dam. But, after her marriage and a few years of attempting farming in the arid valley, the Van Dams returned to Poway to stay and raise their two sons.

Not until World War II, when the war industry lured most of the younger folk to high-paying San Diego jobs and her own two sons were grown and away at school, did Mary van Dam return to teaching.

“It was 1943, and the school board had advertised for a teacher and had received not one application. So they came to me,” she said. “I told them that I wouldn’t do it if I had to go back to school and renew my teaching certificate. So they took me just as I was.”

For 11 years until her retirement, Mary van Dam taught the middle grades at Pomerado School, molding a new generation of Poway youngsters with the same teachings that she had been taught a half century before.

She often started the school day with a prayer, which was legal at the time, and usually read to her classes from the classics after lunch. But, most of the time she spent on the basics, “reading, writing and arithmetic. The Three R’s are as important today as they were in my day,” she said.

“I guess I am old-fashioned, but in my mind I can’t go along with some of the modern innovations. Now they teach the children to use computers, beginning down in the primary grades. I think it’s more important to teach them to read first, save the other things for later. But then, as I say, I guess that I am old-fashioned.”

Those teaching years “were happy years. In fact, I could live my life over again and be perfectly happy,” she said, tears filling her eyes.

“I wish now that I had gone back into the classroom once in a while, since I retired. Just to keep up, you know, not be so old-fashioned,” she said.

Instead, she took up tutoring, prompted by worried parents whose son or daughter was having trouble keeping up with classmates.

“I did quite a bit of that. I would tutor any child who would pay attention and who wanted to learn,” she explained. “I didn’t do it for the money. I did it for the children.”

But, after her husband died in 1975, “and I found myself with too much time on my hands,” Van Dam turned from teacher to historian and wrote her book about the valley that she loved. She described the dairy farms and the sights and smells of the old country store. She told about courting in the horse-and-buggy days. She described the terror of a runaway team of horses and the fear of a smallpox epidemic. She painted graphic pictures of Poway of yesteryear with the same meticulous concentration on detail that she stressed in her classroom.

The Poway Historical Society published Mary van Dam’s history of the town in 1983 and, now in its second printing, it still sells well.

“It is the newcomers to town who are buying it. They all want to know what it was like around here in the old days,” she said of the book’s continuing popularity. “Poway is so different now. It’s a city, and I can hardly find my way around.”

Until April, Mary van Dam lived alone in her Poway home until a small “incident,” a minor stroke, convinced her that her sons were right and she should move into a place where she could take life a little easier. It was then that her former pupils remembered her and decided to honor the teacher that had set them properly on the road to adulthood more than 40 years before.

Arie DeJong, that Dutch boy whom she had taught to speak English so many years ago, was the organizer, and the students of Mrs. van Dam’s fourth- fifth- sixth-grade classes at Pomerado School returned to Poway in September to give her a 99th birthday party to remember.

“We were going to wait and do it on her 100th birthday, but then we thought, ‘Why wait?’ and we can do it again next year, too,” DeJong said.

Most remarkable about the event to Mary van Dam was that a boy remembered her, his grade school teacher, after all these years.

“I might have expected it from one of the girls, but, my goodness, it’s quite unusual for boys to remember,” she said.

About 50 to 60 former students and current friends came to celebrate her birthday with a church choir serenade, a party and presents, and finally a barbecue.

“It was just grand to see them all again,” she said. “It was just wonderful. I’ve had a rich life, a teaching career, marriage, children and now grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”

Perhaps, she thinks, she’ll write another book. There’s half a century of her life and Poway’s still to be told. Her hand is still firm and steady, and, “although I’ve never learned typewriting,” she could still pen a few chapters by hand as she did with her first story. Besides, she has a little time on her hands before her 100th birthday party.