10. a different kind of hero

I didn't know Chuck Smith well enough to know what sort of things he found humorous, but I think he might chuckle at the thought of anyone ever referring to him as a hero or heroic in any way. Again, I can't say for sure; it's only a guess. I only talked to him once. 36 hours later, he was dead. No, he didn't die rescuing a child from a burning building or stepping in front of a shooter's intended victim. His wasn't the sort of death that becomes fodder for a movie. But I nonetheless found the final act of his life to be heroic. I met him once in January 1990 when I was the education reporter at the Marin Independent Journal in Marin County, California, just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.

On the first day of school following Christmas break, which happened to be a Tuesday, I got a call from the principal at Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley. She told me one of her history teachers had been telling students in each of his classes that he was a homosexual dying of AIDS, and that he wanted them to learn from his mistake of having had unprotected sex, because it was about to kill him and he didn't want the same thing to happen to them. The principal said she had called me because she knew what Smith was doing would end up being news somewhere and she believed I would handle the story sensitively "and not start some kind of homophobic witch hunt."

What I didn't know then but found out over the next 24 hours was that Chuck Smith's system had been shutting down for several months.

In October, he had approached another teacher, John Nicholson, with whom he was working on a special social studies project for honors students and said he was afraid of leaving Nicholson with too much of the work load. When Nicholson asked what he meant, Smith replied, "Well, I'm really sick and I don't know how much longer I'm going to live."

Nicholson hadn't known Smith had AIDS. "But after that," he told me, "it was pretty clear." Over Thanksgiving Smith caught a flu bug that his system couldn't kick. It just hammered him. His eyesight began to fail soon afterward. In December, he requested a meeting with Principal Barbara Galyen and Superintendent Walt Buster and told them of his circumstances. A few years earlier, in the heart of the AIDS epidemic, before the medical industry understood the disease and how it was spread, the idea of a public school teacher with AIDS might have caused the very homophobic witch hunt Galyen had told me she was trying to avoid. Parents might have pulled their kids out of the school in droves. But in 1990 Galyen and Buster knew Smith posed no danger to students or staff. He could continue to teach as long as he was able. He had been a teacher at Tam for 20 years, and was good at his job.

"If I can't maintain my standards," he told them, "I'll be out of here."

During the two-week Christmas break his vision got so bad that a person three feet away was a blur. Any activity, no matter how minimal, exhausted him. His body was simply calling it quits. But over that Christmas break, he determined that no matter how bad it got, he was going to keep himself alive until classes restarted so he could teach his students from his mistakes, that they might learn from them. As it turned out, it would be his final lesson.

Before his first class that Tuesday following Christmas break, Smith told his teacher's aide, "Justin, you're going to be my eyes today. I can't see." After roll call, Smith asked for silence and, in as loud a voice as he could muster in his weakened state, said, "There's only one way to do this, and I'm going to come out and say it. I've been suffering from AIDS for the last eight years that I know of and I've probably had it for ten."

Except for Smith's voice and the sniffles of the few students who were crying, the room remained dead silent. He stressed how critical condom use had become for safety, adding that if he had always used a condom, he might not be dying.

Smith spent the whole day spreading that same message, to every one of his classes.

One student, a senior who had been in Smith's class as a freshman, had been so rebellious in that class that it led to almost daily battles with Smith. Once, the student recalled regretfully for me, the boy had called Smith "fag" to his face. Still, Smith had forced him to learn and at the end of the semester he had given the boy an A grade.

"The student told me Smith said this to him:

"You gave me a lot of shit, but I'm going to give you this grade because your work was good enough."

The student shook his head at the memory and his amazement over Smith's actions that Tuesday, saying anybody else in Smith's situation "would go off to Europe or something. But the man was like Job ... the inflictions he had to endure, and he was here with his students. It showed how much he cared."

Another student in one of Smith's classes that Tuesday told me, "You knew he was being really brave, even though he was saying, 'Look, I'm not being brave, but I want you to learn.' He always wanted to help us learn. And that was the final thing he did. He made sure we got something out of this."

The long, emotional day exhausted Smith. By the time I got to the school and went with Galyen to his classroom, his final class of the day was just ending. His voice was pretty shot by this time. What he could muster as I interviewed him was little more than a whisper. Still, he managed to answer my questions for nearly 30 minutes, at which point he could do no more. I knew I would need more information, more quotes, to write the story I would need to write, so I asked him if I could come back the next morning and speak with him before his first class, when he was not so exhausted. He said sure, that would be fine.

By the next morning, though, Smith felt too wiped out to come back to school and called in sick.

That morning, the assignments editor at the Independent Journal told me he wanted me to write up the story with what I had, saying we needed to get it in print before the San Francisco Chronicle or another area newspaper learned of Smith's actions and published a story before we did. I refused, saying Smith hadn't yet told his mother he was close to death (something he had told me on Tuesday) and there was no way in hell she was going to find out about it in my newspaper story. The editor told me if I wouldn't write it now, to give him my notes so he could write it.

I told him I'd burn my notes before letting him see them.

Even with Smith out for the day, I went to the high school anyway, using the time to talk to students about their feelings about Smith and his circumstances. That day, the mother of a Tam High student called a guidance counselor to say how pleased she was that the school had a teacher like Smith and applauding his actions on Tuesday.

"Because her son was very prejudiced against homosexuals," the counselor told me. "And here this person he had admired and respected had identified himself as a homosexual. And her son came home saying how ashamed he was (because of his previous bias)"

That night, while trying to grade some papers, Smith realized he couldn't see them well enough to do the job so he stopped.

He tried to write a note to his brother, telling him teaching had been his life and he was so sad he wasn't going to be able to do it any more.

He died before he could finish the note.