MILLICENT INEZ STEENDAHL — 1904-2002 Millicent Inez Steendahl of Ridgecrest died July 12, 2002 at Ridgecrest Regional Hospital. She was 98. Memorial services will be held Saturday, July 20 at United Methodist Church. Pastor Edward E. Jayne will officiate.
Mrs. Steendahl is survived by her nephews, Rodney Hendrickson and wife Clarice of St. Paul. Minn., and Ward Fanning and wife Ann of Ridgecrest; and niece, M. Doreen Fanning of Sacramento. She was preceded in death by her husband, Victor, in 1973.
In lieu of flowers, the family requests that contributions be made to the Millicent I. Steendahl Scholarship Fund, c/o Searles Lake Federal Credit Union. Arrangements were provided by Holland & Lyons Mortuary.
News Review newspaper Ridgecrest CA July 24, 2002
Trona Teacher Influenced Countless Lives
Ask high performers about who most shaped their lives and the names of their most outstanding teachers are likely to emerge.
Such a teacher was Millicent Steendahl, a petite lady with a towering reputation. When she died July 12 at the age of 98, she left behind hundreds of successful adults who count her as among their most important formative influences.
Her students remember her with gratitude as someone she cared so much about them that she would let nothing stand in the way of their learning. “She was the driving force in Trona High School for that era,” said her nephew, Ridgecrest resident Ward Fanning.
For that reason, the Trona High School alumni dedicated their huge all-class reunion in October 2000 to her. By then she was frail, but she was there in a wheelchair, her famed peppery sense of humor intact.
“When I took her photo, she informed me that I hadn’t gotten every wrinkle!” commented Al Westbrook, Webmaster of the Trona High School Alumni site.
In honor of her fair, but tough, approach, the students called her “The Mean Old Bat of Trona High School”. So proud was Millicent of that nickname that she displayed it on a license plate holder on the back of her wheelchair at Beverly Health and Rehabilitation Center.
“They didn’t mess with Millicent! She had control over her class – and they don’t make too many like that anymore,” said Trona resident Zelda Harvey, whose son Bill was one of many youngsters Millicent tutored on the side.
When illness kept a youngster at Home or when he or she was having trouble keeping up with schoolwork, Millicent was right there to help. Born Millicent Inez Bright in Brodhead, Wisc., on May 26, 1904, she graduated from Central High School in St. Paul, Minn. in 1922. After starting her college years at Hamline University in Minnesota, she transferred to UCLA.
The story of that transfer speaks volumes about Millicent’s determined personality. “Her dad told her, “If you go out there, you’re doing it on your own,” said Ward. “So somehow she pinched her pennies and bought a Model T Ford. She drove across Arizona on the old wood-plank highway.”
Millicent earned a B.A. in the UCLA class of 1929, the very first class to graduate from the new Westwood campus, then located miles out in the countryside around Los Angeles. Before that, the school had been on Vermont Ave. in downtown Los Angeles.
Sheepskin in hand, she returned to Minnesota and accepted her first teaching job in 1930 in Sauk Centre, hometown of Sinclair Lewis and inspiration for his famed novel “Main Street.”
From the beginning of her teaching career, Millicent was an impassioned advocate for rote learning as a tool to help students master the intricacies of the English language. At Sauk Center (sic) Junior High School she began creating and using “Exercising for Better English”, a series of drills in grammar and punctuation.
After several years in Sauk Centre, Millicent returned to California, where she worked as a chaperone, then as a caseworker for the Los Angeles County Relief Agency. In Los Angeles, she met Victor Steendahl and began what her nephew termed “the longest platonic relationship in history.” The Steendahls would marry in 1964.
In the meantime, a business relationship developed along with the personal one. Millicent went into business with Victor. The business, known as Mayan Motifs, involved making high-quality replicas of Mayan pottery and jewelry.
Mayan Motifs flourished until World War II broke out and cut off the company’s supplies. The ever resilient Millicent went to work for North American Aviation, where she used her flair for instruction to develop a training program for record clerks.
After the war, Millicent and Victor began Mayan Motifs again – but the momentum was gone, and they gave it up by the mid-1950s.
In 1953 fate intervened to bring Millicent to Trona. According to Ward, she accepted an English teaching job that had previously been filled by someone fresh out of college.
“Apparently, the young lady’s mother was driving her daughter to her first job,” said Ward, “but before they ever reached the school, the mother turned the car around in Argus and headed back to the city.”
Millicent had no such trepidation- she took to Trona like a born desert rat. And she returned to teaching like the born teacher she had already proved herself to be.
By 1958 she was the girls’ counselor as well as an English teacher at Trona High School. In the ’60s, she taught psychology or “senior problems” and for a while added Latin to the curriculum.
But English was her first love – and at Trona High she continued the practice she had begun back in Sauk Centre of drilling the students on grammar and punctuation. “Before class she’d hand each student a half-sheet of paper every day before class started. The paper contained the day’s drills, and you had to be done by the time the bell rang,” said Ward.
A petite bundle of energy, Millicent didn’t let her diminutive size keep her from maintaining discipline in the classroom. “One time two big guys got in a fight,” Ward remembered. “She waded right in, grabbed each of them by the ear and hustled them off to the office.”
Millicent’s students remembered her as being tough but fair. According to Ward, a former student still sweats over the time Millicent caught him reading a love note his girlfriend had thrown onto his desk during class.
She asked if he would like to share it with the class, but let him off the hook, knowing how embarrassed he would be. “I’m 53 years old,” the former student told Ward, “and I still get chills every time I think about it. If she had made me read that note in class, I would’ve been dogmeat.”
Millicent had a special soft place in her heat for students who needed an extra hand. Many was the time she and Victor took a youngster with them to a ballgame in Los Angeles. “Kids who needed counseling got it.” Ward said. “These were the kids she turned around.”
One of Millicent’s best counseling tools was her love of sports. “If she couldn’t reach a student another way, she could talk about sports,” her nephew said.
Ward also recalled that every year until her death Millicent bet on the UCLA-USC game. She favored her alma mater, but she had also taken some classwork from USC, so she would bet on either side, depending on which team the person betting against her favored.
She retired as a full-time teacher in 1973, but soon tired of inactivity and returned as a substitute teacher and curriculum consultant until 1988.
By then she was 84 years old, an age when most people are content to take it easy. But not Millicent – classroom work had become too strenuous, but she still wanted to work. She turned full time to promoting and selling her “Exercising for Better English” program.
Until she went into Beverly two and a half years ago, what she’d do every day was put her books together,” Ward remembered. “It may have taken her a while, but she wanted to do it herself.”
Millicent’s drills, which Trona High School classes used for years, is still used in schools and home-education programs today. When Ken Parker, former principal of the intermediate school at Trona, moved up to become superintendent of schools at Orcutt School District in Santa Maria, he took Millicent’s program with him.
As for her former students, they never forgot her. “A lot of people wrote or visited her years later to tell her, “If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have made it through college,” said Ward.
As Millicent’s former students entered college, they discovered that the English drills of their high school years had been a great gift they could apply to excel in their advanced studies. “Can you believe I’m an English teacher today?” one Trona alumni wrote to her.
News Review newspaper Ridgecrest CA July 17, 2002
Millicent Bright Steendahl:
“Bulldog Bright” enlightened everyone she knew. With the passing of Millicent Bright Steendahl, the feisty English teacher from Trona, the education world of education has lost a legend. Known as “Bulldog Bright”, to her earliest students, Steendahl maintained strict discipline in all of her classes, yet had the ability to bond with her students.
MILLICENT INEZ (BRIGHT) STEENDAHL Longtime Indian Wells Valley resident and well-known teacher, Millicent Inez Steendahl, passed away Friday, July 12, 2002, at Ridgecrest Regional Hospital of natural causes, she was 98.
Memorial services for Millicent Steendahl will be held Saturday, July 20, 2002, at 10 am at Union Methodist Church, Ridgecrest. The service will be officiated by Dr. Edward E. Jayne, Pastor if (sic) the United Methodist Church. A private inurnment will take place at Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier, California.
In lieu of flowers, the family requests contributions be made to the Millicent I. Steendahl Memorial Scholarship Fund at Searles Lake Federal Credit Union in Trona CA. Ms. Steendahl was born May 26, 1904 in Brodhead, Wisconsin and later in life taught at Trona Unified School District as an English teacher. Steendahl is survived by Nephew and wife – Rodney and Clarice Hendrickson of St. Paul, Minnesota; Niece – M. Doreen Fanning of Sacramento, California; and Nephew and wife – Ward and Ann Fanning. Arrangements and media information was provided by Holland & Lyons Mortuary. News Review newspaper Ridgecrest CA July 17, 2002