Longtime Santa Paula resident Roland Jack Totheroh died May 20th at age 96.
Born in the East San Francisco Bay area community of Niles on August 28, 1914, Jack was the son of pioneer film cameraman Roland Totheroh and Ida Chaix, a sheepherder’s daughter from the Livermore mountains. Before Jack’s 2nd birthday the family moved to Hollywood, where Jack grew up and graduated from Hollywood High School in 1932.
After a short stint as a Depression-era courier for the Federal Reserve Bank, Jack continued his education at Chapman College where he was elected student body president his senior year (BA 1940). He deemed it his responsibility as president to meet all new co-eds, which is how he met his wife Marian. They were married just short of 70 years. He earned a Master of Arts in Education at USC in 1951.
Jack began his teaching career at Antelope Valley HS and Junior College (1941-44), followed by a position at Jordan High School in Los Angeles (1944-45) before moving with Marian and their then two young sons Steve and Dan to Santa Paula. He began teaching at Santa Paula High School in the fall of 1945. Their third son, David, was born two years later.
Many current Santa Paula residents remember Mr. Totheroh as their Civics teacher, Senior Class advisor or school counselor who helped them discover their own potential. In 1952 he moved to a position as secondary curriculum consultant for the Ventura County Superintendent of Schools. In 1953 that position evolved into director of Guidance, then director of Guidance and Research, then director of Research and Testing. From 1955 through 1966 Jack also served as a part time consultant to the director of Pupil Personnel Services in the State of California.
From 1959 to 1965 Jack was director of Data Processing for Ventura County Schools. From 1965 through his retirement in 1984, Jack became regional director of one of only three fledgling Data Processing Centers under the California State Department of Education, at one time serving 150,000 students throughout California and even in British Columbia. Jack was very proud of having run the Center within budget and at significant savings to the school districts served, claiming that his most significant talent was “being smart enough to hire people smarter than I am and then getting out of their way.”
During retirement Jack volunteered as a docent at Santa Paula’s California Oil Museum. He served on the 1988-89 Ventura County Grand Jury. And in 1991 he was honored by the Santa Paula Union High School Alumni Association as their retired ‘Teacher of the Year.’ In 2008 Jack and his wife were presented with the ‘Community Service Award’ by the Santa Paula Rotary Club.
All of those are the facts of his life. But with all due respect to Jack’s father’s black-and-white film career, it is the colorful stories that help shape and define an individual personality. Here are a few that helped make Jack the individual he was.
When Jack was about 9 months old, his father was working for Gilbert M. “Broncho Billy” Anderson (the country’s first movie cowboy) on a western drama. Jack was enlisted to play the title character in “The Bachelor’s Baby.” With the family in Hollywood in the early 1920s, he played the role of a ‘rich kid’ in a few Fox Sunshine Comedies films, similar to the Our Gang/Little Rascals series that became popular a couple of years later. At that time, Jack’s father was still in the early stages of what would become a 38-year career working as Charlie Chaplin’s head cameraman.
In 1992, Jack was asked by Sir Richard Attenborough to play the part of a cameraman in the bio-pic “Chaplin” starring Robert Downey Jr., which was shot in part in Bardsdale, Fillmore and Santa Paula. When he was given another bit part in the independent production “Weekend King” in 2007, shot literally two blocks from the site of his film debut in 1915, Jack Totheroh’s film acting ‘career,’ spanning 92 years, became record setting, very possibly the longest in American, if not world cinema history.
As a boy Jack was a pretty good natural athlete and his early interest in basketball began threads that wove through nearly all his life. In elementary school he developed friendships with four other classmates that remained strong bonds for nearly 85 years. The five of them became The Panthers, a basketball team in a youth league representing the Hollywood YMCA and the Mount Hollywood Congregational Church led by Rev. Allan Hunter, a pacifist from the post-WWI era. Rev. Hunter’s morality, ethics and philosophy strongly influenced Jack, and he remained a staunch peace advocate throughout his life.
In one critical basketball game for the YMCA, one of the Panthers was too sick to play. Not wanting to forfeit the game, the sick teammate sat on the court while the other four managed to win handily in spite of being outnumbered 5 to 4. As a track and field athlete at Hollywood High School, Jack won the L.A City League 660 yard dash in a very respectable time of 1min 23sec., a time that two of his athlete sons could only dream of.
When he began teaching, Jack figured out a way to stay in the game even without his old teammates. He took up officiating high school basketball. It was as a basketball referee that he first got a taste of what the town of Santa Paula was like. It was just the kind of small rural community where Marian and Jack had imagined raising their young family.
After moving to their dream community, Jack began to earn a reputation as a highly respected official. Either he, Cal Houston or Bert Davis were often assigned the most critical games, and this was how Jack gained a small bit of national notoriety. A fan, unhappy with a call Jack made in the league championship game between Ventura and Fillmore, came out of the stands and blindsided him with a very effective right hook. Jack’s mother, living in Arizona, heard about it on the radio.
Because Jack had family roots in the California Gold Rush era, he developed a keen interest in California history. After retirement, that interest became a passion that led him to research the tiniest bits of a narrow segment of that era’s history. Through this research and the numerous articles he wrote, he became a recognized expert on his subject. He was especially proud of his article published in the Ventura County Historical Society Quarterly, which told of the 1853 wreck of the steamship Winfield Scott off Anacapa Island.
In 1975 Jack joined Marian at the Easter Seals pool, swimming laps while she took part in aqua aerobics classes three days a week. The routine continued for over 30 years, with Jack’s sons proudly bragging about their 90-year-old father swimming half a mile three days a week. In the last couple of years it was a real treat to watch Jack’s face light up as he entered the pool and greeted his many friends there. Upon hearing of Jack’s death, one of his swimming partners recalled asking Jack, “What do you think of longevity? ‘It’s overrated,’ was his answer.” Jack “lived his life with curiosity, hope, fascination and courage” and a delightfully wry sense of humor.
When Jack and Marian were honored with the 3rd annual Rotary Club “Community Service Award” for non-Rotarians in 2008, then-President Mitch Stone noted that when Jack retired in 1984 he “had three years of accumulated vacation time which he still hasn’t taken! Everywhere I go in Santa Paula, I am always running into Jack and Marian actively engaged in some community activity, just as they have been for over 60 years. In short, Jack and Marian don’t know the meaning of slowing down.”
One of those later year activities was volunteering time as a docent at the Santa Paula California Oil Museum, where Jack reveled in including history, economics, and somewhat subversive (given the context) environmental lessons in the tours he led.
When the Santa Clara Valley Bank was being formed, Jack made a passionate and emotional presentation to insure that it be a truly community-owned bank. Jack continued to work with bank officers, convincing them they could help young people understand the importance and value of saving. As a result, the bank established what are known as “Totheroh Student Savings Accounts” in which children and students are given special higher than normal interest rates.
All of these stories illuminate some of Jack’s modest attempts to ensure that Santa Paula remained a community in which “It’s a Wonderful Life” would be more than just a movie title. For Jack Totheroh’s life, and for those fortunate enough to have been part of it, it most certainly was. Jack is already being well remembered for his good humor, sunny disposition, keen intellect and warm interest in others.
Totheroh is survived by wife Marian; sons Steve, Dan, and David; granddaughters Joanna Valadez, Kathryn, and Heather; grandson-in-law Pepe Valadez; and great grandson Joaquin Valadez.
The family would like to thank all of Jack’s friends, his exercise partners at the Easter Seals Pool, and the wonderful people at Assisted Home Care, all of whom helped make Jack’s last years and months both pleasant and meaningful, and most especially thank Yolanda Guerrero, whose most tender and giving care made even his last months and days comfortable, dignified and respectful.
The family suggests donations may be made to the California Oil Museum, P.O. Box 48, Santa Paula; Ventura County Farm Museum, 212 N. Mill Street, Santa Paula; or Santa Clara Valley Hospice, 133 N. Mill Street, Santa Paula.
