By Greg Nikkel
Bob King will be leaving his work at the Weyburn Comprehensive School after a half-century of service happy with the work he has done and the people he has met as a teacher, coach and activities coordinator. There was a celebration of 50 years held at the Cugnet Centre on June 2.
Bob was born and raised in Estevan, and after he graduated from high school he went on to university. Mike Badham, who was in Weyburn for a time and was later a city councillor in Regina, pointed him in the direction towards taking education, which he graduated with and went on to have a full career in that profession.
He spent a year in Dinsmore for his first teaching job, and then came to Weyburn in September of 1967, initially just for a year-long contract for teacher Frank Bellamy.
“At that time, there was talk about me applying at the new Weyburn Junior High, but I said no way was I going to go there,” said Bob, adding he also didn’t realize at first that he was hired just on a one-year contract. After he spent that year, he was signed on for Dave Holly, who went back to school, and he was assigned to do half-time Phys.Ed.
“In those days, you could teach anything, any subject. I had no training in Phys.Ed,” he said, chuckling. He taught half his time in biology (which was his major for his Education degree, along with History) and half as the junior girls basketball coach. “That was the end of my teaching of biology.”
Bob went on to teach Phys.Ed from then until 1983, along with some Grade 10 science, and he and wife Brenda took the 1983-84 year off to travel around the world, visiting a total of 27 countries in that time. He met Brenda when she came to Weyburn as an English teacher in 1978, and they were married in 1981.
They were both guaranteed jobs when they returned, with Brenda going back to teaching English. At that time, Bryan Wilson was the principal, so Bob took on Bryan’s Social Studies class, and he taught this from 1984 until he retired from teaching in 1997.
In sports, he coached senior girls basketball for eight or nine years, and senior girls volleyball for about five years.
Bob stayed on as an employee of the school division to look after activities and the facilities, and he was made a private service contractor for the position in the early 2000s. His responsibilities for the high school included Grad ceremonies, awards nights, the musicals, helping the SRC, setting the schedule for the Cafetorium and then for the Cugnet Centre (until last year), and he did the bookings for the band and choral trips each spring as well.
In his time at the Comp, Bob has seen six principals and approximately 15,000 students since 1967.
The students he can recall the most out of those 15,000 were the ones he worked with on the sports teams and in the musicals, as he interacted with them the most, and he noted, “They’re out of their classroom element. You’re dealing with all their hopes, and all their desires and all their emotions.”
Looking back on his career at the Comp, Bob said, “I don’t think there are very many teachers who don’t like the job they’re doing. If you’re teaching, you enjoy teaching.”
He recently received a letter from a young woman who played on a basketball team, “and she was a real pain in the ass. She said in her letter that she gained a new appreciation for the job I did.” He’s kept in touch with a fair number of his former students who were on teams or in musicals.
“The staff have been great here, and we’ve all got our strengths and weaknesses. Teachers do a darn good job, and always have done a darn good job,” said Bob.
Looking back on his career at the high school, he said one conclusion he’s come to is that you can never know where a person will end up, and he certainly had no idea he’d end up where he is when he first came in 1967.
His family’s business in Estevan was in printing, using carved wooden blocks to print large posters for carnivals and circuses, but he noted both his dad and his uncle were determined that none of their kids would follow them in the business.
“As long as we given the skills they need to gather information, to get jobs, give them the skills to raise a family, they will be all right. Most of us didn’t end up where we thought we were going to be,” said Bob.
He laughed as he related taking an aptitude test in Grade 7 which listed some of the occupations he might be suitable for, with one of the options for his career listed as a “tugboat captain”.
“I’ve had a good career, I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s been rewarding.”
