For Auld Lang Syne

By Lauren Coodley

During my 35 years at Napa’s community college, thousands of students flowed through the classrooms. Hundreds of teachers came and went. What follows are excerpts from interviews done by my students in 1995 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the college’s founding. They capture only a few voices, reminding us of the many stories yet to be told.

California quickly established the most extensive junior college system in the country, with 31 junior colleges by 1928, which grew to 57 by 1945.The GI Bill gave colleges a boost after World War II, providing free tuition and books to veterans; most of the first generation of Napa College instructors were veterans. Between 1944 and 1965, Napa Junior College was located on Jefferson Street within Napa High.

During that era, Bob Bernard taught history and coached baseball. In 1948, Bernard and Paul Lathrop’s team won a League championship. When Marie Ross interviewed him a half century later, she was impressed that he could still name the entire roster. He reminisced: “Everything was new and fresh after the war, and the college, really just beginning, was caught in a tide of great optimism.” When the State of California added American Government as a graduation requirement, Bernard collaborated with Napa’s City Manager to produce a textbook for that class.

In 1944, Georgiana Lyons was hired to teach physical education. She taught field hockey, basketball, badminton, tennis, and softball. Lyons herself was an athlete; she developed new classes in archery and fencing and competed in the Amateur Fencer’s League of America, Northern California Division.

Napa educator Dee T. Davis, born on a ranch in 1872, created what might have been the first Napa history course at the junior college, where he began teaching in 1938. Davis had long been fascinated with the history of the indigenous. He accompanied groups of elementary school students on field trips to the now vanished town of Monticello where they collected: arrows, pipes, charm stones, shells, and prayer stones. As Nancy Brennan notes, “The artifacts he rescued from the Berryessa valley would have been lost forever when the area was flooded in 1957”. In 1948 when Davis retired, the Napa High Annual was dedicated to him: “To this man who has helped to preserve the memory of the Indians of Napa County.”

In 1958, George Boyet came to Napa College, where he taught for 33 years. He varied his courses from sociology, world geography, western civilization, Russian history, to his first love, American history. Boyet was an active member of teacher unions and the College Faculty Senate. He described the camaraderie of Napa College in the early days to me: “All of us participated in the civic life of the town.” He described its founders Harry McPherson and Jessamyn West as liberals who enjoyed a wide range of international friends with whom the faculty mingled.

Once, the Asylum—later known as State Hospital—cultivated the land all the way down to the River. Although President Harry McPherson was instrumental in obtaining approval of a $300,000 bond for Napa Junior College to purchase 150 acres of this land, he also mourned the loss of the farm where the inmates had picked peaches and milked cows.

 Louise Erricson, daughter of English professor Hod Erricson, recalled: “It was a Sunday afternoon in spring of 1964 or ’65, and my dad, along with Jim Diemer, President of the College, and Don Macky, the College architect, took a walk around the fields opposite the State Hospital. They talked about plans and hopes for the new College.” Erricson had vivid memories of being a “faculty brat” in an era when her dad’s fellow teachers felt like extended family: at the Uptown Theatre, it took twenty minute to find seats “because they knew everyone else in the entire place. Visits to Food City Grocery Store, the library, or Walker’s Restaurant took hours, due to all the chatting. For the local intelligentsia, who created their own entertainments and amusements, it was much more than a beautiful place to live and raise their families.”

Mary Wallis attended the college from 1961 to 1963. In 1992, she remembered Hod Erricson as someone who encouraged her to think for herself. She also recalled her French teacher Simone Fontaine: “She was very tall, and thin, and always wore floral dresses. She had the classic French red cheeks and we really liked her because she would call the guys jerks in French when they were goofing off.”

When interviewed, Joyce Shane Diemer laughed as she recalled the condition of the new campus in 1965: “It was a muddy, unpaved disaster in the worst condition: it was awful! Other things changed too, besides the environment. On the old campus the faculty was united as a group, and when we moved, that unity was gone. Most of the male teachers wore slacks and a jacket with a tie… as for the ladies, we wore skirts or dresses with heels until the Seventies.”

One of those ladies was Nelda Nocita, who shared a cluttered office with George Boyet in the corner of the 600 building.  There was always coffee, newspapers, and conversation.  When Nelda died in 2005, Boyet eulogized her:

Nelda was involved in the life of the mind. Intellectual freedom, academic freedom, the Freedom of Information Act, the Bill of Rights, freedom of speech, press and religion, were all basic and necessary to her as the air we breathe. Every year she organized a celebration of Constitution Day, with all members of the college community reading it aloud. On campus she defended academic freedom with a tolerance for views in conflict. When she came to Napa in l968, open fields stretched down Imola and Soscol avenues. As a student of rural and urban history, she fought passionately against the South Napa Marketplace, understanding better than most of us how it would destroy countless local businesses. At the community college, she helped raise the intellectual and moral level of the community. As one of the few women teachers in the early days of the college, and the only one raising children alone, she endured overt discrimination which she privately detailed but never publicly litigated — this was before sexual harassment had been given a name.

 George himself died just two years ago. Before the Asylum patients planted orchards, indigenous peoples lived along the Napa River for much of the year. Biology instructor Nick Anast insisted that certain hillocks and mounds not be tampered with or built on, because they could be sacred burial grounds. While he taught at the college, none were.