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CANYON FAN: Van Schaick used
the Santa Barbara landscape to inspire schoolchildren.
Courtesy
Karen Telleen-Lawton |
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.”
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