Proud Harry Departing Freeman School District Superintendent An Innovative Educator With Love Of Students, Sports

From the Valley Voice, June 12, 1999, page V9: CORRECTION The Freeman School District maintenance crew includes six employees: three head custodial/maintenance staffers, two custodians and one grounds/maintenance worker. An article in the June 3 Valley Voice misstated the size of the department.

When Harry Amend became principal of North Pines Junior High, he faced two pressing problems: chewing gum and hats.

“So how do you think two young punk administrators handled these problems?” he asks with a smile.

New rules? No, that’s not Harry’s way.

Working with newly appointed assistant principal Glenna Bouge, Harry announced that chewing gum would be available every day in the school store and could be chewed anytime unless a teacher specifically forbade it. He also turned to a few friends - “the Godfathers,” he calls them - and with their help gave a Chicago Cubs ballcap to each North Pines student. They were, after all, the North Pines Cubs.

“After that there was no more problem with chewing gum or with hats,” he says. “Those kids would do anything for us.”

How many Harry stories are there? More than you have time for - but never enough to satisfy. This well-loved teacher, principal, superintendent and coach has used humor, kindness and daring to do good things for kids in the Spokane Valley for 30 years.

Now, Harry’s leaving Freeman School District, where he’s been superintendent for eight years, to head up schools in Kalispell, Mont.

He leaves a thriving small school district with a reputation for strong academics and community support the likes of which might only otherwise occur in Lake Woebegone. He leaves a campus with pristine ballfields that belie his love of baseball. He leaves coaching, so he says - but within five minutes he agrees that there’s nothing more likely than that he’ll coach in Montana.

And his leaving creates an occasion to tell a few more Harry stories.

How did Harry come by his love for baseball?

From his grandmother. He remembers lying on her gray wool carpet, listening on the big radio - his hand shows the curve of the old ‘40s era radio - to the games of the Portland Beavers. He remembers going to a Beavers game and seeing a center fielder named Louis Marquez - the first black man he’d ever seen - hit a home run.

“I remember thinking that he had hit that home run just because I was there that day.”

Two things are worth noting here. First, one of Harry’s strengths, his peers say, is that he’s better able than most to remember what it was like being young.

“Harry’s never forgotten his youth, says Freeman school board member Dave Koch. “He’s never forgotten that kids don’t always do the right thing … Harry’s saved a lot of kids from a pretty dismal fate by stepping in and using his cool recollection of youth and knowing that you can’t count out a kid who does something immature and bad.”

Second, it’s not unusual for Harry to remember the name of that Portland Beavers center fielder more than 40 years later. His grasp of baseball trivia led to long contests with his players at CV High, where he coached from 1969 to ‘79.

Harry arrived in the Spokane Valley as a fifth-grader. There were six kids in the family, and his father, Dr. Dexter Amend, had not yet started his medical practice.

“We were dirt poor and didn’t know it,” Harry says.

He grew up in a time when he and his brothers would leave home on a summer morning, sack lunch in hand, and not come back until suppertime, after playing ball all day.

After Harry graduated from Central Valley High School in 1964, he went to Whitman College, determined to play baseball and follow his father into medicine. Baseball went fine, he says; but his grades went south. In two years, he transferred to the University of Washington.

He roomed with a couple of Spokane Valley guys, one of whom, Terry Irwin, is now head counselor at CV High.

“Harry was the cook,” Irwin says. “He’d cook up a big pot of something and we’d eat off it all week.”

Spanish rice, Spam and homebrew, Harry remembers.

Irwin also remembers that Harry was serious about his studies and that he needed Harry’s example to keep his own academics on an even keel.

But it was 1968: the year, Harry reminds you, that historians call the longest year in the history of the nation. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, “and Seattle was the center of the revolution.”

The group Students for a Democratic Society was based in Seattle, not far from Harry’s apartment. Harry remembers being hauled out of the UW library one night when he was studying for finals. The cops were looking for the radical students who had bombed the administration building.

Acceptance into medical school wasn’t just following his dad’s footsteps any more, it meant draft deferment from Vietnam. The social turmoil was compounded by physical troubles when Harry needed knee surgery, then had his nose rebuilt after a fast ball hammered him.

That summer, back in the Spokane Valley, Harry was raking the pitcher’s mound at CV High when the school’s principal, Bill Ames Sr., walked over and offered him a job teaching and coaching baseball.

CV High was a powerhouse. The offer was a shock. Harry hadn’t even thought about teaching.

But Harry loved the game, loved to coach and had an eye for pitching. He did his student teaching that year, then started coaching in ‘69. He taught English, algebra and biology. He taught a lower level English class to 24 boys — the 24 worst students in a school of 1,500.

“This was in the days before special education,” Harry says. “Television shows like `Welcome Back Kotter’ were nothing compared to these guys.” He wanted his students to read, to write and to give a presentation. So he brought in things he thought they’d like to read. Motorcycle magazines, farming magazines. And books like “The Godfather.”

“I’d get these guys who’d say they couldn’t read and I’d open “The Godfather” to a really good scene, whether it’s the guy getting drilled on the bridge, or the scene upstairs at the wedding, and pretty soon they’d be sneaking around reading this book all the time.” The novel was such a successful tool, Harry’s classroom at one time had its own set for “The Godfather.”

The door of Harry’s office at Freeman bears two signs, both of them paper. The first one says “Harry W. Amend, L.S.” (The L.S. stands for lagoon superintendent, he explains, after the sewage lagoon he oversaw at the school.)

As of last Thursday afternoon, a red international no symbol was scrawled on Harry’s sign. Underneath, the second sign reads “Bill Thurston,” who in July will claim Harry’s office as his own.

Harry laughs about the signs. The first one’s been up for seven years. But he’s serious when he takes a picture down from one wall of his office. It’s of a flower, done in rich colors.

“I’ve had this since the first year I taught,” he said. He tells the story of Helen Anderson, a girl who couldn’t or wouldn’t write a report for him on “The Good Earth,” but instead turned in this artwork, complete with a separate sketch on which she had written labels on each part of the flower, threading together the different characters and forces in the Pearl Buck classic. The artwork itself was her report.

Harry tells about how Helen left school shortly before the end of the school year, riding away with an older man on a motorcycle. And how 20 years later, she had greeted him in the grocery store one day, still with the same motorcycle man.

Harry tells about spotting Kevin Stocker as a high school sophomore pitching - pitching! - in a varsity game, about writing his first scouting report on this young player - and years later giving Stocker a copy of that scouting report as a wedding present.

He tells about the monthly superintendent’s breakfast meetings at the Harvest Moon in Rockford. The meetings drew teachers who grew to know each other better, parents who could blow off steam over some issue or another, and community members who learned to trust the school people well enough that passing levies has never been a problem for Harry.

“And you’d have to do something to draw them in when there was no hot issue. So we’d have the FFA kids or the jazz band down.” The jazz band, plus proud parents, was too large a group to fit into the regular meeting room, so the management moved them into the lounge.

“Have you ever been in the Harvest Moon lounge? Well, it’s got these black velvet mural-type paintings with these women lying all over, pretty nearly completely disrobed. Here are these seventh-grade and eighth-graders playing the clarinet” - Harry fingers an imaginary clarinet - “and I’ve got my career flashing before my eyes. We’ve got Seventh-Day Adventists and Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses in there and all I can think of is ‘C’mon, let’s get out of here.’”

No one said a word.

Harry was so young - 23 - when he started teaching, that he taught three of his own brothers and sisters. He still remembers the flack he took when his brother Jim ran for student body president at CV High, and his campaign promises included beer in the drinking fountains.

“He was a free spirit. He’s a Baptist preacher now.”

Harry remembers the wonderful success his CV High baseball teams had, particularly in 1970, ‘74 and ‘75.

He also remembers the Saturday he drove down the driveway of his Mount Spokane home, leaving his young family for another day of coaching. He had two sons, then 4 and 2, and he realized that coaching baseball at their expense was not for him. That was the end of his high school coaching. But he coached his three children, from T-ball through American Legion ball. His success as a coach was notorious.

Of course, people who have worked with Harry have their own stories.

Chuck Stocker, then superintendent at Freeman, remembers chewing out his young principal for authorizing and installing a new ballfield one weekend, without checking with the boss.

Gregg Matthews, the one-man Freeman School District maintenance department, remembers Harry sticking his neck out for him when Matthews wanted the school board to try saving money with performance contracting, a new-fangled way of cutting energy costs.

“He didn’t want to do it. But he trusted my judgment,” Matthews said.

George Amend, technology coordinator for the Central Valley district and one of Harry’s younger brothers, remembers getting a letter from Harry when he was in the service.

“It was addressed to Private George Amend. But it had a number 12 on it. That was my football number. Harry remembers those kinds of things.”

Harry believes that if one gives to people in a loving way, they will respond. That’s his background as a counselor talking. But when he became principal at North Pines, he was curious, he says, to see if that same philosophy would work.

And when he came to Freeman, he says, he was still curious to see if it would work.

Now, he’s taking the same question on to the 5,000-student Kalispell district, home of the largest high school in Montana.

“When I decided to go to Kalispell, I wanted to see if you could take a pure, positive, loving, serving approach into a large school district and see if it will work. I think it will work. I really do.”