Photograph by Skye Dunlap

Marty Mathiesen has been part of FUHSD since the district's early days.




Fremont alum rolls with the ever-changing district

By Sam Scott

When the Fremont Union High School District dances and sings to celebrate its 75th Anniversary on March 25, Marty Mathiesen will be watching, and observing yet another milestone in the district he has shaped.

An orchard farmer's son, Mathiesen, 88, has been part of FUHSD since its beginning. He enrolled at Fremont in 1925, the school's first year. (He used to take the street car to Highway 9 and then the bus to the school.)

After attending San Jose State, and teaching in Northern California, he returned to the Fremont district in 1944. Since then, Mathiesen has worn almost every hat possible. A one-time teacher, coach, principal, superintendent and athletic league commissioner, Mathiesen has seen the district swell, shrink, and swell again. He has opened schools and closed one. He saw the five ethnic groups that dominated become part of scores of others. He has seen farmers' kids become engineers. He has touched the lives of thousands.

Guiding him through it all has been a passion for teaching. He says kids need love and encouragement. "You don't get rich," he says, "But you get satisfaction out of it. Some students go on to become doctors, lawyers, scientists. They go all over the world. It's a good feeling."

Mathiesen has given some good feelings too. In the early 1990s, a group of Japanese-American former students gave a dinner on Mathiesen's behalf. They remembered the role he played when they returned from World War II interment camps. Mathiesen, then a track and basketball coach at Fremont, endeavored to get them out for sports, to make friends with them, and to get them involved.

Tom Hashimoto, a former internee and 1953 Fremont graduate, says the honor was well deserved. Mathiesen, he says, would tell the wary students, "You ought to go out for track, you ought to go out for baseball. He befriended us," Hashimoto says. "He made coming back to society much easier."

Still active in the community, Mathiesen has continued helping people well after his retirement. Each year, he presents scholarships to Fremont and Homestead students on behalf of the California Retired Teachers Association. Once a month, he makes the trip to Sacramento to serve on the State Teachers Retirement Board, a position for which Governor Pete Wilson nominated him. He's active in the Sons in Retirment and the Fremont Alumni Association.

"I told him he's one tough Indian," says Tino Rodgriquez, known as "Mr. Fremont" for his involvement in the school. Fremont's mascot used to be an American-Indian.

Keeping busy is something Mathiesen says he learned growing up on a farm and by working in the canneries.

"It was hard work, but we didn't know the difference," he says. "We were always working hard."

Mathiesen says when the stock market crashed in 1929, the fall after he graduated from high school, the effect on their simple lives was hardly felt.

It's a different world now. The school district, that used to give each student a pencil per quarter, is celebrating its birthday in big style.

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Call 408.522.2206 for information on the districts celebration at the Flint Center.

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