Story by Russell Towle
Email Russell ([email protected])
I never had the good fortune to attend Peninsula School, but I did attend Pacific High School, which began as the continuation, through high school, of K-8 Peninsula School. For me it was a great education to meet so many Peninsula School families, families which tended to be more liberal and even outright Bohemian, than the families I knew from going to public schools in Palo Alto. It struck a chord, it tickled my interest, and when that happens I at least try to delve deeply. Some very remarkable people were involved in Peninsula School and Pacific High School. I think of Alan Strain, a Quaker who had been a Conscientious Objector during WWII; of David Werner, riding his bicycle, in 1960, from Germany to the Himalayas, under a sentence of slow wasting death pronounced by his doctors, and so, living life to the fullest in those last, precious few years (but the doctors were wrong, he is alive to this day)–David, the man who wrote “Donde No Hay Doctor,” at Pacific. Of the Duvenecks, who I had the intense gratification to meet and talk with on a couple of occasions, at their ranch above Los Altos. But really it was the families, some of which had seen generations of students attend Peninsula School.