Geoff Duncan

It's funny how influential teachers aren't always the ones you spent much time with in the classroom.

Such was the case for me with Kendyl Depoali back in middle school and high school. When I first met her—I think I was 9 or 10, she couldn't have been 30—she sported a head of hair that would have fit right into any 1970's exploitation movie: tall and wide and tight curls and…well, out to here.

Mrs. Depoali and my mother got to talking at a picnic/barbecue thing for the faculty of a local middle school, just prior to the school year starting. My father was new to the school, teaching English. I had too much root beer and ran around a lot, with the predictable results. Besides the scary hair, Mrs. Depoali stuck in my mind because her family had been in the state longer than anyone I knew: she said her great-grandparents had been born in Nevada.

When I got to middle school, Mrs. Depoali was teaching Home Economics and (I think) German. And I enrolled in the one and only class I took from Mrs. Depoali: Introduction to Computer Programming. It was a summer school offering: back then, computers weren't important enough to be in the main curriculum. (Bear in mind what passed for a computer at the time was the Commodore PET 4000, with a pair of floppy drives and a whopping 8K of RAM. There was a single Apple II in the corner, where we maybe got to play games for 10 minutes at the end of every class.) Mrs. Depoali taught us to write little BASIC programs to manage paper routes, balance checkbooks, do date arithmetic ("how many days since the first moon landing?"), and offer little menus of documents and functions.

In college I directly applied those skills to write an unofficial online help system for the campus mainframes. This eventually got me a job as a consultant in the college computer center, which led to writing the "official" computing center documentation, which, kinda sorta, led me to doing technology writing for the last umpteen years. Funny, that.

While I was still in middle school, a brand new high school was opened out in the boonies. Like a prison, it was literally the only building for a mile in any direction—everything else was sagebrush, and the road leading out there wasn't paved when it started classes. The school recruited some of the best and brightest teachers from surrounding schools, which meant that I had a lot of the same teachers in high school as middle school. Mrs. Depoali was one of those, teaching American and world history, government, German (again), and forensics—debate, not CSI—at the new school. Although I never had another class with her—not for lack of trying, mind you—I eventually became part of Mrs. Depoali's extended entourage of students. By this time her hair had somehow been tamed into a more streamlined form, but her classroom was one of the few places students could safely hide out during lunch, or before or after school when the hallways were supposed to be clear. Mrs. Depoali lent me books from her home—I recall titles on Watergate, Vietnam, and the Great Society. She'd openly discuss local and national politics with us. She'd let us prattle on, and gently let us know when we had a point or were just being silly teenagers. Most of all, she was constantly listening: we gradually realized that explaining a problem at the school to Mrs. Depoali was more effective than complaining to the administration. And asking Mrs. Depoali about something was going to get you a straight answer, not a wishy-washy "we'll see." She also developed a high school class introducing sociology and psychology, possibly the first social science elective class our district had ever seen.

Some people wonder why I have a "gift" for trivia. My junior year, I got cajoled onto our school's Academic Olympic team. AO was basically a silly attempt by the state board of education to make bein' good at fancy book learnin' be as cool as being a jock—team members were even eligible for varsity letters! OMG! It was enough to make us want to run for the hills screaming in hopes of being bitten by rattlesnakes. (Being at that brand new high school in the boonies, remember, hills and snakes were easily accessible.) The only reason we didn't run was because of the teachers selected to "coach" the AO team: the legendary English teacher Mel Shields, and Mrs. Depoali.

"Coaching" the AO team consisted of a couple lunch hours each week in either Mrs. Depoali's or Mr. Shields' classrooms. They'd throw sample questions at us, give us an idea what to expect…but mostly we cracked jokes, talked about news, and had a good time. We started calling them "Uncle Mel and Momma D"—I think "Momma D" might have come from her work coaching the debate team—but Mrs. Depoali got into it, and she and Uncle Mel became a bone fide comedic duo, more or less refusing to let us take the whole "AO" thing seriously and just have fun with it. At competitions, while other teams were quizzing each other with Trivial Pursuit cards or running math problems, Uncle Mel and Momma D were building paper airplanes with us, passing notes during "meets," and suggesting outrageous tactics. "Try offering the judge twenty dollars if you don't know a question," Momma D joked once. "It might work. And Mel's good for it!" Our team was once asked to quiet down or leave the auditorium: little did the judges know it was our coaches who had started us cackling. Uncle Mel and Momma D used to make bets on the matches: I think one was for Mel to treat Mrs. Depoali and her husband (and kids?) to see Paul Revere and the Raiders, who were more or less a constant presence in a local casino. (If I remember, Uncle Mel was the local correspondent for Variety—a whole 'nother set of stories there, including Charo showing up in my Spanish class.)

The just-birthed local PBS station (I think that made four TV stations in town…although maybe a crappy UHF station was going by then) got into the act and decided to televise a "College Bowl"-like show with local high school students forming the teams. At one of the tapings, other coaches were grilling their kids in the green room, having them run all the amendments to the Constitution, state birds, and other almanac stuff. The teams were all eyeballing each other, sizing each other up, nervous…except us. We were throwing wads of paper back and forth, playing air guitar, doodling—one or two of us might even have been listening to a new thing called a Walkman. This being a PBS affiliate, it ran Sesame Street incessantly. Momma D leaned over. "You know what would mess with these kids' heads?" she whispered. "If you all started watching Sesame Street." Oh, say no more! Within about 30 seconds were were crammed cross-legged on the floor in front of the television like rapt kindergartners, following along with Big Bird: "Uno—dos…¡tres! T is for tree!"

We were very loud, the other teams thought we were very insane, and, yeah, we totally kicked ass in the televised thing. And in the AO proposition in general. But I mainly remember having fun hanging out with the other kids, Uncle Mel, and Momma D.

Mrs. Depoali went on to become an assistant principal, then served as principal of Sparks High for three years—she was a Sparks High alum herself. She became Superintendent for Public Policy, Special Projects, and Legislation, then Assistant Superintendent for High School Education, helping develop a new "Gateway" high school curriculum which emphasized math and science without inflating graduation requirements to insane levels.

Today, news that Mrs. Kendyl Depoali died yesterday morning from cancer. She leaves her husband Harold and daughters Christina and Michelle, and grandchildren.

I think of Mrs. Depoali regularly—especially when I vote. I haven't missed an election yet, and even though I never had a government class with her, Mrs. Depoali drilled the importance of voting into me.

And if I ever get called to appear on Jeopardy, I've got an unbeatable green room tactic that'll give me an edge on the competition. Thanks, Momma D.