Catching Up With . . . Charlie Whitehead
Inspired by Spanish language and literature, Charlie has passed along their delights and majesties to new generations
by Brooke C. Stoddard '69
Charlie Whitehead was born in Burbank, California. His parents had met in 1939 on a Grace Line ocean liner traveling from Guayaquil, Ecuador, to Los Angeles. His father, Princeton '35, soon after his own graduation had been reading novels in Hollywood to assess potential for movies. He was asked to accompany a documentary filmmaker to South America and while on the Grace liner met Charlie's mother, who often traveled afield on liners with her purser brother. During World War II, Charlie’s father worked as a film editor for the Pentagon, then after the war and a year back in Hollywood, now married and a father, he drove surplus Army trucks down the Pan-American Highway to Ecuador (Charlie and his mother went by ship) and the family lived there for a year. As a toddler in Ecuador, Charlie learned Spanish before he learned English.
But it was soon back to the States, where Charlie’s father took a job again in the Pentagon and a year later with CBS in New York, settling in Teaneck, N. J. Charlie first attended public schools, thence The Lawrenceville School, where Charlie played hockey among other sports and took up Spanish again. Senior year at Lawrenceville he won an English Speaking Union Schoolboy Fellowship and spent a year in England at the Felsted School and with extra time did some traveling, including to Norway, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, France and Spain.
Arriving at Princeton, Charlie enrolled in an advanced Spanish course, relished it and set his eyes on studying Spanish literature. "I’d always enjoyed poetry and literature in both English and Spanish, especially being drawn to ‘protest’ literature,” he says. He wrote his thesis on Frederico García Lorca, a Spanish poet and dramatist most likely executed by Nationalist forces soon after the Spanish Civil War broke out.
Charlie recalls the Princeton years as good ones. "I loved the campus,” he says. "It was a sort of fantasy place, a neo-gothic village and in a way we were carefree. I loved the freedoms we were allowed to take all manner of courses – History, English, Religion – and the freedom to be heterodox if we wanted. I thought it was a great education.”
Graduation launched Charlie into the inaugural Princeton University Summer Teacher Training Program, a summer teaching course aimed at placing developing teachers into New Jersey high schools. The training not only launched his teaching career – his first placement was in the Hackensack High School – it also gained him good friends, including Woody Halsey ’69, who would play important parts later. After a year teaching in Hackensack, Charlie enjoyed a year’s Fulbright Scholarship in Rio de Janeiro. Next was graduate school at Harvard in Portuguese and Spanish, ending with a Master's in Romance Languages. During that year, Charlie married Lydia Thompson, a Sarah Lawrence student he had met Senior Year and who visited Charlie in Rio, from which, when Charlie's studies were concluded, they set out across South America together and on a wealth of adventures. Then, remaining in Boston, Charlie began to teach at Rivers Country Day School in Weston, Massachusetts. He switched for Phillips Academy Andover, where he taught Spanish while Lydia, a singer, taught music and managed a dorm (the school recently having gone co-ed).
Charlie and Lydia worked at Andover for five years, but when their first daughter Amanda was born they soon understood raising a baby while living in a dormitory apartment was less than ideal. One of Charlie’s friends, Clint Wilkins from the Princeton Teacher Training Program, told Charlie of an opening at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D. C.; the Whiteheads made the move south in 1978.
Charlie’s relationship with Sidwell Friends flourished. He taught Spanish language and Spanish literature as well as coached the soccer, softball and baseball teams for 32 years at Sidwell before retiring not long before our 45th Reunion. "I really liked Sidwell,” Charlie says. "I admired the Quaker aspect. The students were great. And the educational aspect always resurrects itself in the autumn with a new crop of students. Working with teenagers allows you in a sense to remain, in part, a teenager yourself; I liked that. And I liked the philosophy of the literature I taught. I enjoyed working to whatever my students needed so that learning was enjoyable and important to them.” Not a few have taken wing on the Whitehead education to success in academia and elsewhere. One, Elizabeth Alexander, while a student, offered Charlie an insight to Garcia Lorca and Miguel de Unamuno that Charlie has taught ever since; as an adult she read the poem "Praise Song for the Day" at President Obama’s first inaugural. She is currently a literature professor at Yale.
Change in students over the 30 years? Yes. "Students have become more fragile,” Charlies says, "perhaps because they are sometimes too coddled and defended by their parents to the extent that they fear taking risks and learning from failures. When we were young, if parents had to deal with teachers and the school it was the teachers and the school that were believed. Now it is as likely the parents believe the child was right or has to be defended. This became a difficulty and a frustration.”
Summers Charlie liked to travel. Five times before and in college he has driven the Pan-American Highway to points in Central America selling his vehicle upon arrival. "Among other things, these trips were lessons in how to deal with risks,” he says. "For me they built confidence and were an important part of my education." During one year of his Sidwell tenure, Charlie transported his family to Barcelona at the request of Woody Halsey to run the campus there of School Year Abroad of which Woody had become president. Naturally, Charlie’s daughters learned Spanish, which they continue to use in their careers and relationships.
Sidwell Friends has attracted some high-powered parents as a school worthy of their progeny. Accordingly, the faculty, staff and students likely harbor more than an average share of unusual stories. Charlie tells one: "One morning in 1993, I drove to a parent's home to pick up my daughter from a slumber party. I arrived a bit early. Seeing a woman in a car parked nearby, I presumed she was there to pick up a daughter as well, so ambled over to chat. ‘How long have you been here?’ I asked. ‘All night,’ was the reply.”
Now retired, Charlie is planning increased travel – to places that to this point have eluded him and Lydia as well as to a longtime favorite: the Isle of Skye, where one of their daughters will be married this summer. In addition, Charlie enjoys playing hockey with a seniors’ league that has scheduled games and tournaments and has even attracted some national media attention.
Likely, he will not leave Spanish literature behind. Over the span of Charlie’s teaching career, Latin American literature has won worldwide acclaim. Says Charlie: "I think it has become popular because the writers not only offer a philosophical message, a way to live life, but also because they have made their stories adventuresome. They make greater use of fantasy, of the fantastical, though Garcia Márquez, for example, says the ‘fantasy’ is more real than meets the eye. Certainly, Latin American literature has affected literature of the North, but imaginatively North American writers have yet to catch up.”
