Jan Watt - June 2024 Member of the Month

Jan WattJan Watt

Jan Watt - June 2024 Member of the Month

June 2024 ~

Over the last 56 years, Jan Watt (Merit Award) has spent so much time at Cleveland High School it’s a wonder she didn’t start having her mail delivered there long ago.

And through all those years, through the teaching and coaching, the newspaper and yearbook advising, through the countless special projects she found herself at the heart of, if not being the heart of, routinely working 60 to 70 hour weeks on behalf of her school and its students, Watt had always avoided the spotlight as if it were radioactive.

But with that kind of track record, there’s no way Watt could have been thinking she could stay in the shadows forever, right? No way. Especially not with her retirement finally within walking distance and it coinciding with Cleveland’s graduation ceremony at Providence Park on June 4, 2024.

So, yeah, there was no way, and Watt knew it. That’s why before the commencement commenced, she grabbed (it’s easy to imagine a friendly full nelson being deployed, but to date no witness has stepped forward) her friend and colleague, Eric Levine, who would be manning the microphone that evening, and laid down the law.

“The seniors already knew; they were the first I told I was going to be leaving,” Watt says. “So, I told Eric not to say anything, I didn’t want to take attention away from the graduates. He said, ‘Don’t worry, Jan.’ He was so very considerate.”

Watt then took her spot at the side of the stage to help congratulate graduates as they passed, and Levine took his spot front and center to announce them one by one.

Watt takes it from here: “As the last kids are coming across the stage and I’m congratulating them, I vaguely hear Eric say, something, something, ‘56 years,’ something, something ‘Congratulations,’ then ‘And she’s standing just to my right with the kids, as she would be.’ And I’m thinking, That damn friend of mine.”

Her life out of the limelight had finally come to an end but, like Watt’s career, it was great while it lasted. Anyway, it’s not as if she had been keeping any secrets all those years. After all, it wasn’t athletic accomplishments that in 2009 got the Washington High graduate inducted into the PIL Hall of Fame as a Merit Award winner.

“I’m too dang old to have ever competed in organized girls’ athletics,” Watt says. “They didn’t exist then.”

That didn’t mean she couldn’t play. Her bloodline included an athletic grandfather and a basketball playing brother with enough skills to play alongside Washington’s legendary Stoudamire brothers, Charlie and Willie, in the late 60s. For her part, Watt was a good enough softball player to have been offered a tryout with Irv Lind Florists, the powerhouse Portland team that waltzed to the 1964 Amateur Softball Association World Championship in Orlando.

“I turned it down,” she says. “But I was pretty good. I could hit the ball and had an arm.”

But, Watt adds, she was also “hell bent on becoming a teacher, and the sooner the better.”

After graduating from Washington, she enrolled at Portland State and four years later, with her degree in hand, started applying for teaching positions. Before long she learned, in memorable fashion, she had landed her first job.

“I was sitting at Memorial Coliseum, watching my brother play in the state tournament,” she remembers. “My mom shows up and she has brought a stack of mail from home. In that mail was my first contract from Portland Public Schools.”

Watt started at Cleveland in the fall of 1968 and never found a good reason to leave. Then again, she wasn’t looking. Watt was a classroom teacher for 34 years and, when girls sports finally became sanctioned, she coached Cleveland’s first girls basketball team, a position she held for “four or five years.”

Ever since her days at Washington, when she was on the school’s newspaper staff, Watt knew she wanted to teach journalism, which she did at Cleveland, building “one heck of a program” along the way.

Longtime Portland sports journalist and fellow Hall of Fame Merit Award winner, the late Steve Brandon, got his start in Watt's program as did Anne Reifenberg, who won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting while reporting for the Dallas Morning News.

In addition to teaching journalism and being Cleveland’s publications advisor, Watt taught history and economics. Then, in 2002, she assumed a new role as special projects coordinator, a position with a job description that might as well have read simply, “Whatever needs doing.”

Watt helped with, and was an advocate for, a litany of athletics and activities and did “a bunch of announcing” for soccer, volleyball, football and basketball. She coordinated homecoming events, helped with clubs, a school landscaping project and the annual “Bridging the Gap” open house for eighth graders heading to Cleveland. She worked on national testing and school tours and the senior recognition assembly and commencement and with counselors and was one of the original founders and chairperson of the Mel Krause Commerce/Cleveland Athletic Hall of Fame. She served on fundraising committees for Cleveland’s football lighting and field turf projects and the Ed Warren Fitness Center.

(Pauses to catch breath.)

Watt is quick to point out she didn’t do anything alone. Among those who have helped along the way is the proudly self-titled “Jan’s Minions,” a small group of mothers of former students.

“They’ve hung with me for years and have all been phenomenal,” she says. “That’s the kind of community support I’ve always had.”

It was always for the kids, Watt says. Not just the work, but all the off-duty time spent at band and choir and theater performances. “I was here a lot at night. I always felt my support is what they deserved.”

Obviously, the feeling was mutual. During her last commencement, when her friend and colleague Levine directed the bright light her way, the graduating class and everyone else in attendance stood up and gave Watt the recognition she had earned, not just over the previous year but over the 55 that came before them.

“Their response was awesome,” Watt says. “But I don’t like the attention, so I was thinking, I’ve got to get out of here.”

And a few days later, that’s what she did.

Watt says that, for the first time in her life, she hasn’t made any plans for what’s next. It’s doubtful that Cleveland High has seen the last of her. But even if it has, there will always plenty of reminders she was there.

Do you know Jan Watt? If you’d like to reconnect, she can be reached at [email protected]

Photo Note: Click on a photo to see its caption.

 


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