Bock

No one I know has, in the last few days, called Harold Isaac Bock anything but “Mr. Bock.” That’s not particularly surprising: Mr. Bock taught us all almost 50 years ago when we were seniors at Bend Senior High School.

Mr. Bock, who would have been 99 on Aug. 29, died Aug. 12 in his home in Myrtle Creek, south of Roseburg. He had been married to his wife, Louise, for 69 years, a union that produced four children, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. He was, I suspect, teaching somebody something almost until the day he died.

Mr. Bock was one of those teachers nearly everyone remembers. He taught a class called Modern Problems, a kind of current events class. Its purpose, at least in Mr. Bock’s hands, was to get 17-year-olds to look beyond the confines of a small town to the greater world outside, to challenge our assumptions and to make us actually think about what we believed and why.

It all combined to make him among the most memorable teachers any of us ever had.

It also was a reflection of his own background, of which I was completely unaware when I was a student.

Harold Bock was born in 1914 in Ohio but grew up in Indiana. He and his younger brother were both conscientious objectors during World War II, a status that brought him west to Civilian Public Service Camp 21 near Cascade Locks, where he fought forest fires and maintained roads and campgrounds, among other things. It was there he met Louise.

After the war, the Bocks moved to the Macedonia Cooperative Community in Georgia. The collective began as an economic statement in 1937; when the Bocks and others like them arrived, it began emphasizing pacifism. It merged into the Society of Brothers in 1958. From there, Mr. Bock went to college in North Carolina and Indiana and returned to Oregon. He taught in Albany and then came to Bend.

“He taught me to research issues, analyze policies and form my own values about being a citizen and a human being,” Sharry Fassett, now of Arizona, says today. “He challenged me to back up my values with actions.”

Challenge he did, no doubt intentionally. “Sandy” Owen Panner Jr. thought so, as did Donell Lyons Peck and just about everyone who has contacted me in the last few days. He would, they noted, stand back and smile when the class erupted into a shouting match that could be heard all over the building.

There was a genuinely kind side to Mr. Bock that took the sting out of even the most direct challenge. Kathleen Kemple Adams recalled trips to his house, as did Linda Mirich Gelbrich and Donell Lyons Peck. When exchange student Hiko Marutani, from Japan, finished his year in Bend, he traveled with Mr. Bock and four Central American students to Mexico, where they were joined for a time by Mexican students.

Mr. Bock told parents how wonderful their kids were, and told kids, either directly or by his actions, the same thing. It all combined to make him a favorite, not only of the class of 1965, but of classes both before and after. He attended more than one high school reunion as a guest, a sought-out guest we were all glad to see.

Yet his way with students did not always carry over to their parents, and in the spring of 1967 the school board declined to rehire Mr. Bock. Oregon law did not require districts the size of Bend’s to grant teachers tenure, and Bend did not. He went on to the University of Oregon for both a master’s and Ph.D. In 1974, he moved to Myrtle Creek and taught at South Umpqua High School.

Of all the memories former classmates have shared in the last few days, the words of futurist Mick Mortlock perhaps best describe what makes a wonderful teacher:

“… He changed my life,” Mortlock wrote. “He knew that my parents had not finished high school, but he took me seriously anyway. He told me in his booming voice that I was not limited by the successes of my parents or doomed by their failures. Many times he said to me, ‘You can be anything you want.’”

A memorial service will be held Sept. 20 at 1 p.m. at Wilson’s Chapel of the Roses, 965 W. Harvard Blvd., in Roseburg.