Jack Mayeda, S.F., San Mateo County educator, dies

There was the kid he steered away from a gang. The student he stopped from smoking. And there were the countless other young people who just felt better for having entered his world.

Longtime San Mateo County educator Jack Mayeda of San Francisco has died from a heart attack. He was 79.

The titles he held during his quarter-century career don't quite tell the story. He was assistant principal at a now-closed Portola Valley middle school in the mid-1960s, then became assistant principal and dean at San Mateo High School around 1970. In 1992, he retired as administrator of the San Mateo Adult School.

But beyond the disciplinary duties and paperwork demanded by those roles was a quiet gentleman with an ability to connect with raucous and sometimes troubled students.

"I was always amazed when I went to graduations or senior proms with him that there was so much respect," said Nancy Mayeda, his wife of 44 years. "I don't know what it was. Kids flocked to him."

Gang troubles

One day, a friend told the Mayedas that their child was having gang troubles. Mr. Mayeda found a way to transfer the student out of San Francisco and into a San Mateo school. He then drove the teen to school and back every day as part of his commute.

"Today, that student is very successful," Nancy Mayeda said.

He helped others, too.

"He was a great man, and made quite a difference in my life," Bonnie Rock Bodeck of Illinois wrote the family. "I'm the one he always caught smoking, and always got detention."

The San Mateo Police Department once named him Citizen of the Year.

Born July 19, 1931, in Othello, Wash., Mr. Mayeda and his family escaped the forced internment of Japanese Americans during World War II because their home sat 1 mile east of the detention boundary.

He joined the Army during the Korean War and served three years in Hokkaido, Japan.

He earned his bachelor's degree in education from Seattle Pacific University, then took a master's in pupil personnel and counseling from Santa Clara University.

In the early 1960s, he became the first national youth director of the Japanese American Citizens League, inspiring young people to work on behalf of civil rights for Japanese Americans.

At a league-sponsored dance class, Mr. Mayeda invited a member of the board onto the dance floor. They married in 1966.

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