George Brucker

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Photo by William Farmer WGHS '70 in 1970.

This is a re-posting of a remembrance from a former student, Roy Harris, WGHS '63, which is included on the WGHS1963.com web site.

George Brucker

Few teachers in our school’s history have rivaled math teacher George Brucker in the respect they commanded, and the praise they won, among students.

But he also gained a national reputation in his field – especially in promoting what were then the somewhat revolutionary and controversial concepts of “New Math.” In his view, math was a science that, like any other, needed to undergo constant change, to allow it to support other areas of study. In the computer era, and the Space Age, he certainly was proved right in that.

Students celebrated the way he encouraged them to develop their own new approaches to problems. Over more than three and a half decades at Webster High – a career that began in 1948 – a surprising number of students inspired by him themselves became math teachers or engineers, reflecting his love of mathematics. Just look at the website comments from our classmates about the teachers that impacted them the most. You’ll see the names of math teachers, engineers, and others who developed their math skills. My best friend Charlie Edmunds, Mick Norton, Gary George, Bill Hitchens, Alan Henderson, Ernest Reeves, Scott Davis and Bob Feldmann, to name a few.

Two years after we graduated, Mr. Brucker was featured in a newspaper article in which he argued against mathematics getting bogged down in old ways of thinking. He also was honored by Yale University as one of the nation’s five most influential high school teachers, based on testimony from students.

Mr. Brucker told a reporter at the time: “Personally, I couldn’t have chosen anything I’d like better” than teaching math. “So many people just endure their jobs,” he said. “I get a terrific bang out of mine.”

Sadly, though, that enthusiasm faded in George Brucker ’s later life, years after we left Webster High. The word among school administrators was that he had various disagreements with the principal in his final years as a teacher. He retired in 1985, when he was 67. At the root of the problem may have been his sense that it was harder to reach students in the ‘Eighties. One family friend told me that Mr. Brucker believed students were displaying less interest in learning. He was spending too much time disciplining students – something he hated. (He had once been a principal himself, and hated that, too.)

Retirement didn’t seem to help his spirits much. From his long-time home in Columbia, Illinois, just across the Mississippi, he played golf and bridge, and kept in touch with Webster friends. But his feeling about the continued slide in learning, as he saw it, depressed him. In the years before his death in 1993 – at 75, from respiratory failure – he told Webster High officials that he didn’t want anything written about him when he died. Indeed, there was no funeral service for him. And only a short obituary appeared.

That’s hardly the way his students from the mid-Sixties remember him, though. They remember not only his sharp mind and his interest in guiding students toward finding their own solutions to problems, but also his playfulness in the classroom. Recently I talked to Bob Batts – a Brucker student from the Class of ’65 who went on to become an engineer in New England. Bob shared with me the story of how his entire class once showed up in Mr. Brucker’s class wearing bow ties – his own signature neckwear, of course.

Mr. Brucker didn’t notice for 10 minutes; but when he finally got the joke it totally cracked him up. Note that he took off his own bow tie for the photo – perhaps so as not to upstage the ingenuity of his students. I also heard a story about how Mr. Brucker purposely rumpled his bow ties during the day – after meticulously tying them at home in the morning – so as not to appear too formal with students.

When the entire class wears bow ties, George takes his off!

From the newspaper in 1985.

WGHS 1956 yearbook lists George Brucker as "Dean of Students"

1980

1969

From the 1969 yearbook.