JERRY PERSON
I can't tell you how many people have stopped me on the sidewalk to
tell me how much they'd enjoyed reading about some of their former
teachers and how little they knew about them and wished they had
gotten to know them better.
This week, we are going to look back at a man who taught
industrial arts at both Huntington and Marina high schools. I hope
some of you remember Dale Smith, and hopefully some of his wisdom
rubbed off on you.
Dale's parents were farmers in the rural town of Roseburg in the
state of Oregon. It was in this small town that Dale Winston Smith
was born in 1904.
I know of some kids today that balk at walking a few blocks to
school. Dale would have to travel seven miles to school and seven
miles back over a dirt road.
After completing grammar school, Dale would continue his education
in Roseburg's high school. While in high school, he would become the
school's basketball team manager and, more than once, inspired his
team to win the state's basketball championship.
After school was out in the afternoon and during summer vacations,
Dale worked doing maintenance work at a local road construction camp,
and he also worked at a logging camp.
After he graduated from high school Dale enrolled at Oregon State
in 1923. He received his bachelor's degree in 1928 after five years
of hard study.
Dale came to California, where he studied at Hemphill trade school
in Los Angeles for six months. To earn money for his studies, Dale
took a job at a Firestone Tire & Rubber Company service store in of
all places, Brawley. Now if you have ever traveled through Brawley in
the summer, you would think that the heat would have melted the tires
off the cars.
He attended UCLA, and it was there that he would earn his teaching
credentials. For three and a half years, Dale would remain with the
Firestone company. They had him working from Brawley all the way to
Long Beach.
It was during this period of his life that he met Betty Bourhill,
a home economics teacher at Huntington Beach High School. The
relationship blossomed into something more, and Dale and Betty were
married up in Portland, Ore., on July 10, 1936.
Now with a wife, Dale worked evenings at the Douglas Aircraft Co.
In 1941, their twin daughters, Joan and Jean, were born and he began
teaching auto shop and welding classes at a local high school. In
1944, he became an industrial arts department head with a staff of
eight instructors under him.
He taught industrial arts to many of our youngsters at Huntington
