Orange County Register, CA
June 19 2005

A rebel with a cause
Teacher P.O. Marsubian, often at odds with authority, related to kids
who felt the same. He pioneered a night high school program that
turned him into

Sunday, June 19, 2005
AMY MARTINEZ STARKE

P. O. Marsubian, a Portland high school teacher, had two motives in
the late 1960s when he came up with the idea of an alternative high
school. For starters, he saw juniors disappearing from the halls
at the now-defunct Adams High School in Northeast Portland, and he
wanted to give dropouts, street kids, minorities, throwaway kids,
and gang members a way to earn a diploma.

But he also saw an alternative high school as a way to get away from
bureaucratic rules that chafed and an administration headquarters he
bluntly called “the nut hut.” He identified with disruptive students;
he was a rebel and outsider himself.

So when administrators said no to his idea, it didn’t slow him at
all. It took awhile, but he got his way, and eventually the night
high school began serving young people others had given up on.
“Anybody can teach the stable kids, the smart kids,” he said. The
tougher the challenge, the greater the triumph, P.O. thought.

The night school tolerated street language and unconventional
behavior. P.O.’s own classroom language was quite colorful, but
students could tell he was really angry when he used the king’s
English.

Eventually the waiting list included both teachers and students;
students recruited their friends. P.O. brought students home to feed
or house. The phone rang in the middle of the night, and more than
once he bailed a student out of jail. P.O. retired in the mid-1980s
but continued to substitute.

Students will remember the teacher they called P.O. as a stout man
who wore a suit and tie to school. But at home, he wore faded denim
bib overalls to the day he died, May 24, 2005, of congestive heart
failure. He was 79.

P.O. was born Parimaz Onan Marsubian in Chicago to Armenian immigrant
tailors who escaped the Turkish genocide. He flunked first grade
because he could only speak Armenian, but he soon mastered English.

In 1942, he joined the Navy and, though he asked for combat duty,
was stationed in Pasco, Wash., as a parachute packer. In Pasco,
he met Lee Parker at a dance, and they married in 1945.

After the war, Lee worked while P.O. went to Northwestern University
on the GI Bill. Their son was born in 1947, about the time P.O.
became friends with Martin Luther King Jr., who once held their son
on his lap. They later had a second child, a daughter.

P.O. and Lee decided to move out West, and P.O. taught at Jefferson
and Roosevelt high schools in the 1950s and 1960s. He became a union
official and a thorn in the administration’s side.

At Roosevelt, he convinced a group of students to raise money
for their own purposes by selling dill pickles for 5 cents each,
and he refused the principal’s demand that he turn over the money.
Administrators sought to defuse his energetic union organizing by
plucking him out of Roosevelt and transferring him to Grant — a move
that had the opposite effect.

In the 1960s, P.O. began to study the stock market. “You can’t buy the
company, but you can buy a piece of it,” he figured. Eventually, he
became an informal stockbroker, at one time managing the portfolios of
26 friends, including the mail carrier; he never charged a dime. His
stocks underdogs that made good — were graphed with paper and
pencil. He once gave 1,000 shares in a Canadian gold-mining company
to a student. Hold on to these, he said; gold is coming back.

At night high school, P.O. taught social studies, geography, politics,
survival skills, personal finance, the stock market and real life. He
also taught handyman repair: He could do it all himself.

Night school stayed at Adams until Adams closed as a high school in
1981. It then moved to Grant, where it remains.

P.O. saw some of his former students go on to make good. Although
wedding invitations came regularly in the mail, he refused to attend.
He despised weddings, funerals, organized religion, and gift-giving
and receiving.

In 1990, his wife suddenly died. He made himself available to baby-sit
grandchildren on a moment’s notice, and since 1992 had a girlfriend.

Before he retired, P.O. lived in a decaying North Portland neighborhood
near a notorious prostitution zone. His wife was once mugged at
their home. But when others were fleeing, P.O. refused to move. He
didn’t like the suburbs and predicted a resurgence of Portland’s
inner city. He maintained a free soda machine in the garage for
neighborhood kids.

Near retirement, P.O. and his wife moved to a house on a North
Portland bluff. Every morning , he hosted a club of friends at his
kitchen table, where World War II and political topics were cussed
and discussed. P.O. was a card-carrying member of the ACLU, and he
read The New Republic and Mother Jones, with a concession to The Wall
Street Journal. Gore Vidal was without a doubt his favorite author.

Around his home on the bluff, kids like to smoke weed, drink and drive
gangsta-looking cars booming tunes from behind darkened windows. He
was not afraid. He installed a bench, loaned them tools and invited
them to park in his driveway. “Hey, P.O.” they called when he walked
out. Those were his kind of kids.