Barb Seidel mystery is uncovered

May 4, 9:45 AMSouth St. Paul ExaminerRob Shirk

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Beloved Teacher, Special Friend, Barb Seidel

Springtime is rarely a time for looking back, even if it is only to last November.

Spring seems to be more of an optimistic, hopeful time of year with warm temperatures, flowers growing, baseball, vacations being planned...and no school.

For the education community, however, it may be one of looking back and feeling the pride for a kid that you didn't think had a chance making something of him/herself and thoughts of your own performance as well as your colleagues of the past school year. Everyone thought the world of Barb Seidel. She has her own spot.

Barb Seidel's memorial, a small plaque in the ground outside Holy Trinity School and Church in South St. Paul has reappeared after months of being covered with the ice and snow of winter. It reads, in three lines, "Beloved Teacher, Special Friend" Barb Seidel".

This profile started last November 2008. I thought that it was such a gracious thing to do to honor a teacher, a profession that gets less of what they deserve in money and respect. Funny, though, I could find nobody on the grounds who knew who she was. No one in the school or church shed any light on the matter of who she was came from an Examiner.com reader. Her nephew wrote last February in the comments section about the November post and filled in some of the blanks. I recently spoke with her brother, Bob, who filled in the rest. My thanks to both.

Her memorial has interested me for some time. I walk by there fairly often with Buddy, the genius dog, and it has always struck me as a peculiar, but very cool thing. It is a City Secret if ever there was one.

Barb Seidel was six years old when she and her large family move to the Summit Avenue neighborhood of St. Paul. There were lots of kids but she managed to find her way to The College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, embarking thereafter on a life that was filled with teaching. She must have done something very right for the people of a school to honor her in such a way.  She also taught at Annunciation School in Minneapolis as well  making stops in New York State and Rockford, Illinois.

My son's math teacher, Mr. Olson, received a "Silver Apple Award" which is no small thing, I assure you. It will not, however, grace the grounds outside  South St. Paul  High School in perpetuity like Barb Seidel's marker outside the school at Holy Trinity on 6th Ave.So. in South St. Paul. Her death came as a shock to everyone as she was felled by a heart attack at the age of 54 in 1991. Everbody was shocked. Maybe her heart was too big.

We live such a jaded life. Bad news seems to be lurking around every corner with questionable solutions down the block a little  farther on. It seems that to get a person to say a simple "please" or "thank you", is like pulling teeth. The "Yes, sir, Yes, ma'am" responses for children and adults seem to be at an all time low, respect being kind of low on priorities.

It isn't so new, though. I sometimes forget about Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and I laugh at them today because I see myself in them just like you do, in one way or another. I'll bet a whitewashed fence and a Mississippi River raft that Barb Seidel laughed and taught her minions why they should appreciate debauchery, too

I suspect that Barb Seidel's students didn't stray too far from the straight and narrow and I reckon that even Huck and Tom,  in the end, figured out what they had and preserved a memory of a teacher, too.

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