For almost 60 years, Frank Van Schaick has lived in Santa Barbara’s Rattlesnake Canyon in a redwood and sandstone house he built by hand. He points with pride to the sandstone slab doorsill, which came from the original adobe dwelling on the 19th-century Spanish land grant, owned by Matias Reyes. But “Van,” 93, remembers when he was at Stanford.
“I delivered newspapers in Palo Alto; that’s how I earned my way.” But there came a time when he had too few San Francisco Chronicle customers or had footed the cost of too many dates in his 1933 Ford Coupe convertible. “One quarter I couldn’t afford to stay in the hall. I’d study in the library until it closed, and then I’d just drive out and lay my sleeping bag by the Frenchman’s Bridge. Guys with late dates would come out there and shine their lights at me.”
Van is a retired teacher and naturalist, whom I interviewed for a book about the canyon. His property, forested with live oaks and tilting into a noisy creek, reminds Van of his boyhood in the Bay Area. At 8, he hiked with school friends from Millbrae over the mountains to the beach, and back, some 20 miles. He once caught a mole and crafted a soft watch pocket by drying and chewing the hide.
“Couldn’t you get some disease from that?” I asked.
He smirked. “The mole might, but I don’t think I would.”
In the middle of the Depression, Van was pleased to get a teaching job after graduation. He took a train down the coast to Santa Barbara. “Looking out at the sea at dawn, I saw a bald eagle on a crag. I was absolutely thrilled.”
Days later, he stood at the front of Room 10 in Wilson School, regarding the expectant faces of 40 boys and girls. “I thought I knew all a teacher needed to know, and by noon I had done everything I knew,” he says. “That’s when I began learning to teach.” His academic repertoire soon included the naturalist’s activities he loved: mapmaking, specimen collecting, camping. His classroom kept live animals, which students released on a celebratory day each May. The students tanned skins and carved totem poles. In 1992, Wilson School alumni reunited in a glade that they had arranged officially to name Van’s Meadow.
These days he reads and reminisces. “My father loves Stanford,” says his daughter, Mimi. “We’ve made fifteen ‘last trips’ to The Farm.”
“Eh? What’d you say about Stanford?” Van says, cupping his hand to his ear. “I’d like to go there one more time.”
- KAREN TELLEEN LAWTON, ’78
