Recognizing Chalkboard Athlete Frank Eufemia

$R7CXWEVRecognizing the value of making a contribution to the field of education, sometimes a professional athlete will become a teacher after they leave the game. This is true of major league baseball player Frank Eufemia.

Frank was born in 1959 in the Bronx, New York. He was drafted as a relief pitcher for the Minnesota Twins during the 1985 season. Frank finished the season with a record of 4 wins, two losses, an earned run average of 3.79, and thirty strike-outs.

This chalkboard athlete currently teaches physical education and health and coaches baseball at Pascack Hills High School in Montvale, New Jersey.

Pat Nixon: The Pretty Teacher of Whittier High School

cvr9781416576051_9781416576051_lg[1][1]I was really surprised to learn that former First Lady Pat Ryan Nixon had been employed for several years in the 1930’s as a business teacher at Whittier Union High School in Whittier, California. In fact, she was working as a teacher when she met her future husband, a young and ambitious city attorney named Richard Nixon. Pretty and popular, the former Miss Ryan instructed courses in typing, bookkeeping, business principles, and stenography. Her students remembered her fondly, writes Julie Nixon Eisenhower in a very detailed and very personal biography about her mother published in 1986. You can read all about Pat Nixon’s teaching career in the book Pat Nixon: the Untold Story, available on amazon.com.

Laura Bush: Spoken From the Heart

cvr9781439155202_9781439155202_lg[1][1]Anyone fascinated by presidential history, libraries, and teachers, whether Republican or Democrat, is bound to be interested in the recent opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Museum and Library last week in Dallas, Texas. It is times like this when I like to  remember that former First Lady Laura Bush was once a teacher and a librarian.

Laura Bush gives readers a wealth of detail about her experiences in her Texas classrooms, the libraries where she worked, and the annual National Book Festival she inaugurated in her 2011 autobiography, Spoken from the Heart. The book covers the other details of her life you would expect to find in an autobiography: her childhood and education, how she met and married George Bush, her difficulty conceiving and the eventual birth of her twins, her husband’s gubernatorial and presidential elections, and her role as First Lady.

If you want to get to know Laura Bush better, be sure to read this book. You can find Spoken from the Heart on amazon.com.