Another of my 2009 stories from the Woodson Class of 1967:
Barbara Lanzer was one of the truly interesting women in our class, and it was my loss that I never knew her.
Her life has been a good story.
Here it is:
WELCOME BACK
If there was one thing Barbara Lanzer never expected, it was that life and her career would bring her right back to where it all started.
When Barbara Lanzer first walked the halls of W.T. Woodson High School, the school was only a year old. Everything was new, from the gymnasium to the planetarium, from classrooms to bathrooms.
Woodson’s Class of 1967 was only the second to enter the school as freshmen, and most of us never thought of the school as anything but new. Trees that now tower over the building were little more than saplings and the football field didn’t even have lights installed for night games yet.
More than 40 years later, a lot has changed at Woodson. The roof blew off the school in an April Fools Day tornado in 1973 and it was closed for a year. Currently Woodson is in the middle of a massive renovation replacing systems that had been operating since the school opened in 1962.
What once was new now is old. Woodson students attend one of Fairfax County’s oldest schools, although the renovation – scheduled for completion in the fall of 2009 – will change a great deal of that.
Yet one member of the Class of 1967 is still at Woodson, or was until just recently. Until she received a promotion in the summer of 2008 that has her overseeing a number of schools, Barbara Lanzer was the principal of a special education program for students with emotional disabilities.
It was a turn Lanzer couldn’t possibly have expected her life to take.
“I never would have believed I would be back at our old school,” she says. “I never in a million years had ever envisioned myself becoming a school principal.”
***
Some kids went through high school totally oblivious of the world around them, while others were almost always aware of their surroundings. They noticed things, and if they didn’t understand what those things meant, they pondered them.
Most kids who entered Woodson in the fall of 1963 after growing up in Virginia never had attended classes with black students. In fact, it was students in a Virginia county – tiny Prince Edward County in the southern part of the state – who initiated one of the five cases that were incorporated into the seminal Brown v. Board of Education in which the Supreme Court ordered schools to desegregate in 1954.
Shamefully, Virginia fought that order with everything it could. Senator Harry F. Byrd, a former governor, devised what was known as “massive resistance,” and some counties closed their public schools rather than comply with the court’s ruling. Prince Edward County actually had no public schools at all from 1956 to 1964.
Woodson first integrated in the fall of 1965, with four black students, but it was our senior year when all of a sudden there were more than 200 in a student body of 3,300. It would have been tough not to notice them, but Bobbie Lanzer saw more than most of us did.
“I have a very distinct picture in my mind of the day the black students arrived,” she said. “I remember how scared they looked. I was scared too, but not of them.”
What frightened her were the parents.
The white parents.
“They were on the sidewalks protesting what was happening,” she said. They looked really scary. I remember seeing parents that I knew, parents that I thought were good people. They were so angry.”
She remembers very clearly walking into the school building that day and not knowing what to expect. In the end, not much happened. We learned that the black kids weren’t all that different than we were. Life went on. There was still a Homecoming Dance, Santa Claus still showed up for Christmas and we graduated on time the next June.
Things have changed a lot more since then. Race isn’t about black and white at Woodson anymore. In 2008, white students made up only 64 percent of the 2,100-student population, but there are even fewer black students than there were in 1966. More than 32 percent of students are Asian, Hispanic or “other,” classifications that wouldn’t even have registered in our student body.
It’s a different school, a different Virginia. Harry Byrd is long dead, as is Massive Resistance, and Virginia’s electoral votes in the 2008 presidential election actually went to Barack Obama.
“There is a large Asian population of students now, some black students and some Middle Eastern,” Lanzer said. “Woodson is frequently thought of as a ‘pale’ population without much diversity, but when you see the students cross the stage at graduation, they are all different shades and the names are definitely not Smith and Jones.”
Still, Lanzer remembers the days of little diversity. She went from Woodson to college at William & Mary, and she recalls how surprised she was her sophomore year there to realize that there were actually two black girls living in her dormitory.
“I remember at the end of my second year of college going down to the basement level of my dorm and running into two black female students,” she says. “I asked them where they had been living, because I hadn’t seen them before.”
They told her their rooms were in the basement.
“They said Monty (the house mother) had placed them there,” she says. “Monty was from South Africa and apartheid seemed to have come with her when she immigrated to Williamsburg. I knew she was rigid, but I didn’t fully comprehend the meaning of that until I met them.”
***
Since those days of the mid 1960s, when it seemed as if everyone at Woodson was white, middle-class and suburban, it’s difficult to remember all the people we knew and in what context we knew them. But people – particularly male classmates – remember Lanzer. In fact, there’s a term that didn’t exist when we were in high school that has come up several times in those memories.
Hottie.
Lanzer herself says she reached puberty early, and seemed more sexually mature than many of the girls in the Class of 1967. That early maturity probably made her seem even more special to guys who were pushing it to shave once a week.
Jerry Flavel was the lucky guy who was her date to the Senior Prom.
“She deserved better,” he said. “She was sooooo HOT and I, even for a 17-year-old high school senior, was so inexperienced with girls. I do occasionally look fondly at a pre-prom picture my dad took of the two of us at my house – me in a red plaid cummerbund and bow tie, she in a beautiful aqua green/blue gown with her long fiery hair tumbling down around her face.
“I kick myself now that I didn’t pop in on her while I was finishing up an Army Reserve tour at the Pentagon this past fall.”
Gary Gray remembers images. Roy Orbison’s song “Pretty Woman” makes him think of Lanzer even today.
“She’s the first person I think of when I hear that song,” he said. “I guess Roy must have been part of the soundtrack of our friendship. And … it fits.”
He remembers her as easy to be around.
“Always,” Gray said. “Engaging, piercing eyes and her Villager dresses. A great look for her. And her perfume – Windsong. I’ll never forget that fragrance. I guess it really does ‘stay on your mind.’”
He remembers dancing with her at the 15th class reunion – “Or maybe it was the 10th,” he said – and remembers that it made his night.
“By the way, I Googled Barbara Lanzer,” he said. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think you’re supposed to still be using your high school picture on your professional website.”
Lee Millette shared several classes with her at Woodson and they both went to the same college, William and Mary.
“We have actually stayed in touch a little bit over the years mainly through mutual friends,” he said. “I remember her as being very smart and funny and a little bit sarcastic, which I found attractive probably because I was a little bit sarcastic too. She was also very attractive, so I definitely enjoyed talking to her and I remember that we teased each other, but I simply do not remember what we talked about.”
Dudley Wilson knew her through the Drama Club; in fact, she was one of the first people he got to know when he came to the school as a junior in the fall of 1965.
“At first I thought she was flighty and somewhat of an airhead, but as time passed I realized that beneath that was a person of substance and intelligence,” he said. “The roles she played in plays that I remember seemed to reinforce the former. I think she fooled a lot of people. Look where she is now.”
Dale Morgan didn’t get to know Lanzer until long after high school. Morgan has organized most of the class reunions, and Lanzer joined her committee and helped out for a while. Then about the time of the 35th reunion, both women were dating classmates from the Class of ’67.
“There we were, 35 years later, double dating,” Morgan said. “That is when I really started to get to know Bobbie. She was going by her given name, Barbara, at the time as she was a principal for the disabled (I know that is politically incorrect) section of Woodson.
“But when I really got to know her was when she and I flew out together to join the Northwest group of Woodson grads for that reunion in the summer of 2008. Bobbie is very sure of what she is saying it seems; she thinks first and everything comes out in big words and long sentences, and I am just me…blabbering whatever comes out of my mouth so we seemed to complement each other quite well. I kept her laughing and she kept me on track.”
***
Who knew life would turn out the way it has for Barbara Lanzer? Certainly not Lanzer herself. She says she never pictured herself in education; in fact, when she was in high school she wanted to become a marine biologist.
“One of the reasons I wanted to attend William and Mary was to study oceanography,” she said. “But I became bored in a large biology class that was taught by a very nice – but boring – professor and I kept becoming more involved in the theatre.”
That clearly wasn’t going to work out. Her parents told her they would not financially support a Drama major, Lanzer herself both wondered if she was good enough as an actress and whether she could make it through college on her own.
She decided to explore other majors.
“I submitted my honors thesis topic in Sociology when I was a junior,” she said. “But that was right about the time I realized I didn’t want to take any more Sociology courses.”
She had been taking courses in clinical psychology, which she enjoyed, so she switched her major and also picked up some special education courses. After that, she picked up a masters degree that combined educational psychology and special education at the University of Hawaii.
But if any of the guys who remember her from high school are picturing her going to classes and then spending the rest of her time on the beach in a tiny bathing suit, forget it. Lanzer was in Hawaii with her first husband Dan, who was stationed there with the Navy. She had married at 19, and was beginning to wonder if she had made a mistake.
“My world and the rest of the world collided during my senior year of college,” she said. “My husband of two years had missed the draft by a few numbers and then signed up to attend Officer Candidate School in Newport, R.I. I had a hard time comprehending his going into the military, and it was at that point that I began to realize what it meant to marry too early.”
She and Dan had married with too much yet to be determined. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life and neither was she. So of course, the marriage didn’t last. Neither did a second one, which technically ended in 2003 even though Lanzer and her husband separated for good in 1991.
Her family life now is her and her daughter, who Lanzer and her second husband Richard adopted from Korea when she was just 7 months old. Marissa graduated from Woodson in 2007 – her mother handed her the diploma on the 40th anniversary of her own graduation – and went on to Lynchburg College.
Lanzer lives about a mile from the school, and when she was still working full-time at Woodson, she sometimes rode her bike to work on nice days. Now she’s no longer there and her job is much more complex.
She serves as an administrator, assisting in overseeing three “pyramids” of schools – Woodson, JEB Stuart and Annandale High — and all their “feeder” schools as well as Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology.
Those schools make up “Cluster III,” one of eight clusters in the Fairfax County Public School system. Her duties include helping with the evaluation and selection of principals; mentoring assistant principals (and anyone else who would like her input); acting as liason with parents and community (troubleshooting, answering questions, etc.); coordinating professional development (and offering it) to school-based administrators (principals and assistant principals).
“I miss having my own students and my own faculty,” Lanzer said. “On the other hand, I really like stepping outside the world of special education and being able to view education, K-12. I like going into the elementary schools and being able to see what the high schools will inherit in the not-too-distant future. I like problem-solving with parents and with administrators and helping them find a workable solution.
“I like the people with whom I work and we make a good team. After all these years, I still hold firmly to the belief that public education is essential to the freedom of a society.”
Lanzer says her life has turned out very differently from her parents, although there were definitely ways in which they shaped it.
“My parents were older,” she said. “My father was born in 1908 and my mother in 1910, so both of them were products of the Great Depression as well as both World Wars. To this day I am conscious of not throwing away usable items. I may give them to charity or to friends, but ‘waste not, want not’ was part of my upbringing as was a very decided work ethic.”
She started babysitting at age 11 or 12 and saved most of her money. She worked several different jobs during high school. In fact, she says, except for the first four months after her daughter arrived from Korea, she has worked all her life.
She expects still to be working when she’s 64.
“I stopped thinking of 64 as extremely old when I turned 50 and realized that I still felt pretty young and energetic,” she said. “When I look in the mirror, I see the gray and the wrinkles, but I still feel great. So as long as I can keep moving and enjoying life, the next age won’t seem so old.”
***
Lanzer’s own memories of her high school days aren’t all as rosy as those of the people who remember her.
“I viewed myself as being on the fringe of many groups and having many different types of friends,” she said. “I didn’t feel ‘in’ and there were times I cried because I felt that almost no one liked me.”
She knows now that those feelings were mostly her own insecurities, and admits that she might not have the most accurate picture of how others saw her. She says she loved participating in school activities, particularly school plays.
“I did a lot of growing up at Woodson,” she said. “Although I don’t know that I would necessarily equate growing up with becoming more mature.”
One incident Lanzer recalls from high school says so much about the insecurities that plagued most of us in those formative years. She had gone to a sock hop after a basketball game during her freshman year. She was with a number of friends, including cheerleader Susan Morales. Two of the school’s top athletes – Gabe Oliverio and Dave Strong – came up to the two of them.
“Gabe asked her to dance and Dave asked me,” Lanzer said. “I was blown away and not feeling at all self-confident. I stupidly asked him who had put him up to asking me. The look on his face told me I was way out in left field. He had asked me because he wanted to. I wished I could have melted into the floor.”