Mary Lee Walton; Hall of Fame O.C. Teacher

Mary Lee Walton, who taught classical languages at Newport Harbor High School for 28 years and was known among friends as a Renaissance woman because of expertise in culture and languages, has died of cancer at age 91.

Walton, who retired from teaching in 1975 and was later inducted into the National Teachers Hall of Fame, was remembered as an intellect and free spirit, someone who took up sailing so she could better communicate with her students and once walked away from teaching so she could study Russian.

Walton earned a bachelor’s degree in 1932 from Stanford University, where she turned heads with the red sports car she drove. Family members said she had hoped to pursue a job in journalism but, because of the tight market during the Depression, turned to modeling instead.

She settled in Newport Beach in 1959, buying property in the Newport Heights area with a view of Newport Harbor and the Balboa Peninsula.

As a teacher, she was known to go to lengths to educate her students. “She used to create dialogues for her students in French,” said her daughter, Sandra Pettit, 64, of Santa Monica.

“But to relate to her students, she took sailing classes so she could create these dialogues about things that interested her students. I think that was amazing.”

She spoke Latin, French and Russian. After teaching Latin and French at Newport Harbor for several years she became bored, relatives said, and took a break to learn Russian at Middlebury College in Vermont.

In her later years, she was active with the Orange County chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and enjoyed more leisurely pursuits such as tennis, which she played into her mid-80s. She spent her days playing piano, listening to Mozart or Beethoven and playing bridge or Scrabble, friends said. She was married three times; her last husband died when she was 76.

“She was a very independent woman,” Pettit said. “I just remember how much she was ahead of her time. The intellectual in the red sports car in 1932.

“And her education . . . she took very seriously the purity of language. She used to argue with my son about the proper usage of words. She used words with precision and did not suffer patiently their abuse.”

Walton, who died June 5, is survived by Pettit, two grandchildren and one great-granddaughter.