John Ertha, an educator and a rights activist; 82

Sad News

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/obituaries/articles/2009/10/23/john_ertha_an_educator_and_a_rights_activist_82/

Early on, John Ertha considered a life in the ministry or the theater, and then chose to meld those callings and become a teacher.

Along with making classrooms his principal stage, he directed summer camps in New York and Maine, preaching responsibility and understanding to youths of different races and social classes. Drawing campers from cities and suburbs, Mr. Ertha used theater productions to teach children, teenagers, and young adults to create, think, and lead.

“He was a philosopher’s philosopher, a poet’s poet, and a teacher’s teacher,’’ said the Rev. John Buehrens, who attended the camps and is minister of First Parish in Needham. “He could recite reams of wonderful poetry from memory, and he could engage an individual child in a ping-pong match that changed that child’s life.’’

Mr. Ertha, a longtime civil rights activist who taught for many years in Newton and Boston, died in his sleep Oct. 4 in his daughter’s home in Freeport, Maine. He was 82 and had suffered strokes and heart ailments in recent years.

“He had tremendous gravity,’’ said James Remar, an actor who grew up in Newton and has had recurring roles in television shows such as “Sex and the City’’ and “Dexter.’’ “He had a fierceness about him and a compassion and a loving aura, all at the same time. He laughed very, very heartily, like he was going to bust out of his skin, and if he became angry, the bowels of the earth shook.’’

Desegregation and busing were shaking the foundations of Greater Boston during many of the years Mr. Ertha was a teacher or assistant principal at Newton North High School, Weeks Junior High in Newton, and Boston Latin, among others. When tensions in 1968 led to a walkout at the Gibson School in Dorchester, Mr. Ertha helped lead a “liberation’’ school during the two-month boycott.

Ultimately, though, he believed that race was superseded by class as “a far more insidious problem,’’ he told the Christian Science Monitor in 1975.

In an experience that set an example for those he taught, Mr. Ertha challenged John J. Kerrigan, a Boston School Committee chairman and city councilor who ardently opposed busing, to a televised debate during the desegregation years. That encounter turned “sworn enemies’’ into friends. Mr. Ertha later publicly defended Kerrigan, writing in a 1994 letter published in the Globe that he “is not a racist.’’

“Like the hero of ‘Prometheus Unbound,’ he walks ‘upright, unholy, graceless, swift and proud,’ ’’ his letter said.

John Edward Ertha grew up in the tiny northern Maine town of East Hodgdon, the fourth of 10 children in one of the few black families for miles. His father was a potato farmer who lost work during the Great Depression, and his mother had taught at Tuskegee University.

“His mother and his aunt instilled in all the children a love of poetry and literature,’’ said Dr. Darlene Handy Ertha of Ipswich, Mr. Ertha’s former wife. “If you went to a family gathering, one of them would start reciting poetry, and then another would take it up and another and another.’’

Mr. Ertha’s family moved to Bangor, and he worked in Portland at the outset of World War II, building ships until he was drafted into the Army and stationed in the Pacific.

Returning home afterward, he graduated from the University of Maine at Orono with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1955, the year he married Darlene Handy.

They moved to Connecticut, where Mr. Ertha graduated from New Haven Teachers College two years later with a master’s degree in teaching.

He taught in Connecticut and brought his family to West Newton, meeting Remar while teaching at Weeks Junior High. After Remar impressed his teacher by answering a difficult Greek mythology question, he connected with Mr. Ertha and attended his camp for a couple of summers.

“It introduced me to the theater and gave me a sense of family and community that I desperately needed,’’ Remar said. “He helped make me feel competent at a time when I really did not. He helped open up my world to me.’’

Structuring summer weeks around stage productions, Mr. Ertha schooled scores of children in the art of responsibility at camps in Carmel, N.Y., and the Maine communities of Denmark and Naples. Mixing youths from different races and religions, the coeducational camps were an invigorating experience for those who attended during Boston’s desegregation years.

“The whole world was changing, and it just seemed appropriate that he would step in and take his place as one of the great mentors at a time when we were beginning to see the color lines dissolve,’’ Remar said.

“It was a remarkable place for young people to test their capacity to take care of something other than yourself, but you had to start with taking care of yourself,’’ said Buehrens, a past president of the Unitarian Universalist Association.

All decisions were democratic, Buehrens added, and a 6-year-old’s vote carried the same weight as an adult’s.

Maine officials closed Mr. Ertha’s Naples camp in the late 1970s because of code violations, a turn of events not completely surprising to those who loved Mr. Ertha and his summer gatherings.

“To say that he was organizationally impaired would not quite cover it,’’ Buehrens said with a chuckle. “He resented and resisted those things that impinge upon us and require that we organize priorities. John lived in the moment.’’

Mr. Ertha and his wife divorced after 20 years, but remained friends, and he lived in Dorchester before moving to Freeport, Maine, two years ago as his health declined. At home, he was as much a teacher as he was in school, said his daughter, Susan Ertha Wiemer of Freeport.

“He was very much concerned with our intellectual development, and all around the house were great, great books, Greek mythology and poetry,’’ she said. “He made you want to use your intellect to its highest potential.’’

And that, Mr. Ertha told the Monitor, was what he tried to achieve in his camps.

“We don’t give kids credit for what they can do,’’ he said in 1975. “They have an amazing capacity to run their own lives if they’re given the chance.’’