Love of writing and students fires her up

Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

James Joyce, “The Dead”

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In front of a classroom of chatty 12th-graders, Rose Gilbert is passionately demonstrating how not to fade and wither with age.

Sporting a red plastic firefighter’s helmet, she tells her 30 students that “I’m on fire,” and she wants them to be on fire, too. She sticks a gold star on the forehead of one good-natured young man who has said something clever. As she dashes about the room -- looking like a kindergarten teacher in a blouse printed with bookshelves, a sweater vest adorned with crayons and globes, and sensible Mary Jane shoes -- she exhorts her “bubbies” to elaborate on the themes of the Irish writer James Joyce’s novella “The Dead”: spiritual paralysis, people’s inability to live fully, the necessity of love.

“In Ireland,” she tells them dreamily, “they call rain ‘a softness.’ ”

They believe her. Why wouldn’t they?

Rose Gilbert is 88. With the retirement last year of a 93-year-old health teacher in Sylmar, Gilbert became the oldest full-time teacher in Los Angeles Unified School District, apparently the oldest in California and one of the oldest in the nation. She has taught for more than 50 years -- first at University High School in West Los Angeles and then at Palisades Charter High School in Pacific Palisades, from its opening day in 1961.

She married into money, which allowed her to visit many countries (rainy Ireland among them) and do many things.

Unlike most of the green teens in her literature classes, she has experienced life in all its Technicolor palette. In her nearly nine decades, she has reveled in love and endured punishing loss. Her second marriage, to wealthy UCLA booster Sam Gilbert, brought happiness -- and scandal.

“She has so many stories, and she knows what she’s talking about,” said Erica Pool, 17.

“She really is a dynamo” -- all 5 feet of her -- “more energetic than most of my other teachers,” added Eric Rosenstein.

She is “Mama G,” and Erica and Eric are just two of the thousands of “bubbelehs” she has shepherded in an honored career. Any plans to quit, Mama G? “I’ll quit when I’m tired.” Ever get tired, Mama G? “No!”

Living history

“At University High School, I taught the children of Frank Sinatra, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin and Robert Mitchum. And some of the Beach Boys.”

The memory carries Gilbert back to the 1950s, when she started teaching after years as a stay-at-home mother, chauffeur and PTA volunteer.

Now a great-grandmother of six, the English teacher is still powering her way through three Advanced Placement classes and one honors class each week.

Wearing oversize wire-framed spectacles, she prepares class plans, grades papers the day students turn them in, coaches Academic Decathlon participants and still finds time to do yoga, lift weights and avidly support the UCLA Bruins men’s and women’s basketball teams.

“People think you die when you’re over 70,” Gilbert said. “You either live living or you live dying, and I’m not going to die.”

To see the walls, and even the ceiling, of Room 204, Gilbert’s lived-in classroom, is to grasp the bond she has achieved with generation after generation of students.

Exuberant posters and signs indicate that Gilbert is equal parts schoolmarm, mentor and materfamilias. “All my poetry is great. All my books are great.” “Mama G is watching you. Big Brother is watching you.” “I am not your maid.” Some posters feature words shaped long ago from Cheerios, a favorite Mama G snack, now gray with dust: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless student.”

In December 1966, a class created this inside-joke memento: “Mrs. Rose Gilbert is hereby authorized to serve food and beverage to her little sluggards.” From the 1987 Academic Decathlon team: “Thank you, Mrs. G. Love, your bubbs.”

The Class of 2006 montage features students’ photos and the names of the top-notch colleges they planned to attend: New York University, UC Berkeley, USC, Harvard.

Like many of her favorite female protagonists (Anna Karenina, Lady Chatterley, Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening”), Mama G flouts convention. In California, teachers retire on average at age 61. One-third of California’s 308,000 teachers are expected to retire in the next decade.

At a time when overcrowding and students’ surly behavior are driving teachers out of the classroom at an alarming rate, Gilbert is that rare teacher for whom burnout is simply not an issue. “I’m not burned out, because I love to interact with the kids,” Gilbert said. “I love to stimulate them.” Each semester, she lectures on dozens of great works, among them “The Great Gatsby,” “The Iliad,” “Waiting for Godot” and “The Stranger.”

Two-time Emmy winner J.J. Abrams, creator of television’s “Lost” and “Alias,” is a 1984 Palisades Charter graduate who found Gilbert’s English class “really hard.” She was “spectacular in communicating ideas, and her personality was electric and compelling,” he recalled.

“Her passion for teaching and looking for insight into literature was something that definitely made me think about how writing worked and how you construct a good story.”

Kiki Vandeweghe, a standout basketball player at UCLA who spent several years in the pros, took two of Gilbert’s classes in the mid-1970s and remembers her as “a little ball of fire.”

“Every single day I walked in there, she gave her passion to that class,” he said. “She taught you how to read a book and really get something out of it. She taught you how to write.” The skills he gained, he said, have served him well in writing for ESPN.com and the website of the Denver Nuggets, a team that employed him as general manager for five years.

Gilbert doesn’t teach for the money. Although she says she grew up poor in Boyle Heights, the daughter of Polish immigrants, she graduated from UCLA in 1940 and soon went to work as a contract agent at MGM Studios. “I remember working on Red Skelton’s contract on Christmas,” she said.

In 1950, after her first husband died of an aneurysm, she married Sam Gilbert, an inventor of door locks who went on to become a hugely successful builder and developer.

When he died in 1987 at age 74, she inherited millions and the house he had built for them in Pacific Palisades, which today remains filled with souvenir plates and sculptures from their frequent trips and laminated clippings about his business dealings and his many years as a UCLA basketball booster.

‘Born to teach’

Rose brought a young daughter, Maggie, to the marriage. Sam had two sons, Robert and Michael. The families blended.

Sam encouraged his wife to go back to work, saying she was “born to teach.” Even in her leisure time, around their dining room table, she would encourage UCLA basketball star Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) to go to graduate school. (He chose professional ball instead.)

Over the years, “Papa G,” as Sam was known, served as mentor and advisor to many players, becoming known as the “godfather” of UCLA’s basketball program. His close association drew scrutiny because some of the services and favors he provided team members violated NCAA rules.

In 1981, he emerged as the central figure in an NCAA investigation that led to two years’ probation for the school’s team. Rose Gilbert maintains that Sam “was doing good helping the kids.”

Days after Sam Gilbert’s death in 1987, he was charged in a federal indictment with racketeering and money laundering in connection with a Florida marijuana smuggling ring.

His son Michael was charged with conspiring to defraud the Internal Revenue Service and was later convicted. He served more than five years in prison before the verdict was overturned by an appeals court.

Rose Gilbert doesn’t care to discuss this and remains close to Michael and proud of her family’s connection to UCLA. Over the years, she has endowed more than a dozen scholarships at the university.

Attending Final Four games is one of her rare excuses for an absence from class. Even when she had a heart attack in June 1998, she scheduled open-heart surgery for July so that she wouldn’t have to miss much school.

For the three weeks she did miss, she recorded lectures for her students and graded their papers.

In 2004, Gilbert suffered her most tragic loss when her daughter Maggie, a swimmer and scholar, died unexpectedly. Gilbert donated $1 million to Palisades Charter High for a swimming pool in Maggie’s honor. Plans for the pool are underway. She also created scholarships for UCLA’s scholar athletes program in Maggie’s name.

For a time after Maggie’s death, Gilbert felt that she could not continue teaching. But she found a support group of other parents who had lost children and, in her indomitable way, began to move beyond her grief.

Meanwhile, Gilbert has become more of a celebrity with each passing year and each teaching award. Teacher magazine just put her on the cover of its May issue. UCLA publications feature her often.

Many of her favorite books and passages speak to living life to the hilt. That is her approach in the classroom. She quotes from Albert Camus’ “The Stranger”:

I had been right, I was still right, I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another.

As Mama G contemplates turning 89 in August and starting a new school year in September, she can imagine only one way to live her life. “I really look forward,” she says, “to every day of teaching.”

martha.groves@latimes.com