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By Tom Rosenstiel
My sisters and I were surprised how much we didn’t know. Not until near the end. And when we began to empty the house.
Our mother, Joyce Rosenstiel, who rose from a classroom volunteer when she was nearly 40 to become the first woman principal in the history of the Sequoia Union High School District, and later the oldest resident of the Skylonda Junction neighborhood of Woodside, had died, one month short of her 98th birthday.
But I never knew that she decided to become a teacher — after 19 years as a homemaker — when I came home from school one day with an incorrectly graded spelling test. I learned that from a newspaper clipping in a scrapbook hidden among photo albums on a bookshelf.
“It infuriated me,” she had told the Palo Alto Weekly. “Then I decided that if I was going to get mad, I should do something about it.”
That was her. Don’t get mad. Do something.
She volunteered as a classroom aide at Ravenswood High School in East Palo Alto and enrolled in a program for a teaching credential at College of Notre Dame. Her first day as an aide in a remedial reading class, the teacher walked out. “Rosenstiel, the volunteer, was suddenly the teacher,” the newspaper recounted.
I heard 50 years later about the Black student at Ravenswood who asked Mom if it were true there was no such thing as Black Literature. It was 1967, her first year teaching. Shocked, she answered it was absolutely untrue and decided to create a course. When she looked for books by Black authors at Keplers, however, there was only one. She discovered more at an East Palo Alto barber shop, and the rest at a Black-owned bookstore in Oakland. Then she created the course, her first lesson in the challenges of curriculum creation.
She transferred to Woodside High School in 1969, became vice principal of instruction nine years later and moved to Menlo-Atherton High School in 1982. Less than two years after that, amid a controversy involving the principal, she was named “acting” principal.
I only learned what happened next from a research paper we found cleaning out the house, written by a graduate student who shadowed my mother for a profile of the life of a public school administrator. In its then-89-year history, the Sequoia District had never hired a woman principal. Now it advertised the position nationally. My mother had no intention of applying, thinking she had little chance. She changed her mind at the last minute.
“When I looked at the job description,” she told the graduate student, “I had already done most of it. But I had to be accountable to someone else, and I wasn’t always able to do it exactly the way I thought it ought to be done because I was not the head banana.”
She decided, “If I was going to do all the work anyway … at least I would be accountable to myself.”
That was her, too. The head banana. Accountable to herself.
Her management style was simple: Hire motivated people. Get them all the resources you could. And support them.
Three years later she would go to the White House to receive an award at a Rose Garden ceremony honoring Menlo-Atherton as one of the outstanding public and private high schools in the nation.
Blunt, practical, and inclined to solutions rather than worry, she was intensely proud of but not especially emotional with me or my two sisters. We were fine, living safe and secure lives. But she had an extraordinarily soft heart for people in trouble. She worried about one Ravenswood student from Fiji, living with relatives far from home. She invited him to spend the weekend. He stayed two years.
Cleaning out the redwood log cabin in Skylonda she and my father, Eddie, bought in 1975, we discovered a cache of letters from parents, colleagues and former students from when she retired in 1990, after our father suffered a heart attack.
“You have been a role model … for me and many female educators,” and “demonstrated quite well the fact that ‘women of today’ can have it all,” wrote a counselor.
A Los Angeles attorney — who hadn’t seen her in a decade — wrote: “I look back to Woodside and think of you … as a major influence on my life. … Thank you for all you did for me.”
When she was 91, another former student emailed me looking for recollections of her. He was writing a book. “As a senior at Woodside High School in 1969, I took an English class from your mother … The emphasis was African-American literature. … Her class had a huge impact. …. [She was] a much-needed and welcome voice of kindness, sensitivity, empathy and compassion, something I have never forgotten.” She’s still alive and very much kicking, I answered. He got an afternoon of recollections firsthand.
Born in Chicago in 1926 and the first in her family to attend college, she called her educational background “speckled” — two years at Carleton in Minnesota, then the University of Chicago to study international relations. I didn’t know until going through her papers that she was one credit shy of a degree in 1947 when she married our dad, the California cousin of her college roommate. When they moved west, she finished her degree at UCLA.
Like many young women, she took up the task of writing letters to soldiers in World War II. “Please don’t hold hands with anyone else,” wrote Bill. She didn’t marry Bill, or any other pen pals. She married our dad, Eddie, the cousin of her college roomate. But she kept the sweet, innocent letters in a box for 79 years, along with a trove of our father’s love letters.
When Dad had his first heart attack, Mom coped during the surgery by drafting her school’s master schedule, a task that normally took weeks, in a few hours of perfect concentration.
The longest chapter of her life, retirement, lasted 34 years. She and Dad fitted out a Volkswagen camper van, criss-crossing the American West to see kids and grandkids. I knew they traveled internationally. I learned after only after she died that, in the 16 years my dad had left, they visited over 60 countries.
For most of the next 18 years following his death, she would drive down the mountain in the morning, not returning till dark, just as when she worked. She had taken up birding, quilting, and painting, supporting local theater, the public library system and land preservation. She worked for more than a decade to convert the private lands of Rancho Del Oso into a state park.
We found in the house an autobiographical sketch she wrote for an exhibition of local artists: “Retirement is a time of self discovery,” it read. “There isn’t enough time in any day to follow all the paths now open to you. Whatever path you choose to explore, happy journeying.” Still the teacher.
Into her 90s, her friend Hilary Hart told me, she was part of a group called The Wednesday Walkers. When the full hikes became too much, she would stop along the way and sit and sketch until the others returned.
Her good friend and neighbor, Sandy Turner, remembered her 50 years in Skylonda this way: “Joyce knit sweaters for every new baby on the block and tutored neighbor kids in math and science.” During her teaching years, she frequently gave rides to kids who overslept. “Her home was always available to locals in need of a place to stay, whether it was someone with more guests than bedrooms or staff from Alice’s restaurant stranded by a storm or road closure who needed a bed for the night.”
In 2020, when she was 94, my sister and I flew to the Bay Area to persuade her she could no longer live in the rustic cabin behind Alice’s Restaurant. It was too remote, and she could no longer drive. She told us that if we would not support her living as she wanted, she would find people who would. Two weeks later, amid COVID, we relented. She passed away gently, in her sleep Oct. 5 in the redwood cabin she loved. The head banana. Accountable to herself.
Rosenstiel is survived by her three children, Karina Buck of Los Angeles, California, Beth Rosenstiel of Big Lake, Washington, and Tom Rosenstiel of Washington, D.C., five grandchildren and three great grandchildren.
A memorial will be planned. In lieu of flowers, the family suggests a donation in Joyce Rosenstiel’s memory to either Friends of the Woodside Library woodsidefriends.org/donate or Rancho Del Oso Nature and History Center ranchodeloso.org/donate.
Tom Rosenstiel’s first newspaper job was a summer internship at the The Almanac. He later worked as a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek and directed the media research at the Pew Research Center. He is a Professor of the Practice at the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
I was a math teacher, working at MA during Joyce’s reign as principal. She was simply, THE BEST! Her staff meetings were actually interesting, in no small part because she was so well spoken. She ran the school like a mother with a large family. I loved being part of her staff and am sad to know she has passed. The only comfort is believing she is now with her beloved Eddie. Margo McAuliffe