Sixth in a series
Re “An Easy Chabola Decision. ‘I’ll Take Two of Those,’ He Says.”
[img]1372|left|Jerry Chabola||no_popup[/img] Forty-one years ago this month, Jerry Chabola, the retiring athletic director of Culver City High School, graduated Saint Mary’s College in Northern California – and that was the problem. Up north was not home.
“Immediately if not sooner,” he said,” almost before shedding his cap and gown, Mr. Chabola came home to his first teaching assignment, LaSalle High School, Pasadena, operated by a religious order, the Christian Brothers.
Already a married man, he needed to start earning a living.
Mr. Chabola and his equally prominent, equally peripatetic wife, Janet, had married after his junior year at Saint Mary’s. They had been close for years.
“Here is how we met,” says Mr. Chabola. “We are standing together in our first grade elementary school picture at St. Mark’s in Venice. We started dating when we were juniors in high school (at St. Monica’s, Santa Monica). We grew up together. Our families knew each other through St. Mark’s, which was a 1-through-8 school then.”
Kind of a 42-year-long storybook.
Together they form one of Culver City’s most formidable couples.
No doubt about Mrs. Chabola, the insurance executive, being a Type A personality.
Mr. Chabola is – “I am a Type A in my own way. I get involved in lots of things. But I don’t always tend to be the point person. She is more likely to tell you, flat out, ‘This is the way I feel.’ I am a little more diplomatic.”
It was not entirely coincidental that Mr. Chabola reeled in his first post-graduate position at LaSalle High.
The Christian Brothers also teach at Saint Mary’s, and after his first opportunity in the Bay Area broke down, the Brothers found an opening at LaSalle. Family ties were forged. A member of the Chabola wedding party still is the vice principal at LaSalle four decades later.
At a small school, teachers must multi-task. Mr. Chabola was the JV baseball and JV basketball coach. And how about this? He was the cheerleader advisor, also the senior class advisors and taught six classes a day.
Maybe that was when the retirement talk started.
(To be continued)
