Seniors pay tribute to 'Miss Gray,' longtime drama teacher

As such, he knows people typically wouldn't take him for a Shakespeare buff.

But he was a tap dancer as a kid and performed on stage, so he felt comfortable taking Margaret Gray's drama class at Bellingham High School. That's when Shakespeare entered his life.

"I have always loved Shakespeare," said O'Malley (class of 1957). "That came from Miss Gray."

O'Malley and about 100 other people, most of them well into their retirement years, gathered at Bellingham High last Monday, Dec. 7, for a special tribute to "Miss Gray." Judging by a show of hands, most of them had performed or handled stage duties for her during their high school years.

The tribute was organized by Brian Griffin and Neelie Nelson, the Bellingham co-authors of "My Darling Anna." Their book springs from a collection of letters that Will Gray, a young physician, wrote from Fairhaven in 1890 and 1891 to his fiancée, Anna Kurtz, back in Iowa.

Gray returned to Iowa in 1891 to regain his financial footing and marry Anna. They resettled in Fairhaven in 1901, but not before giving birth to their only child, Margaret Elizabeth.

Margaret Gray shared her mother's interest in teaching and her father's love of language and the theater. She taught in Bellingham schools for 45 year; with her last 20 years at Bellingham High, from 1938, when the school opened, to 1958, when she retired.

During those two decades her students presented an annual operetta that became major community events in those pre- and early-TV years. Attendance at a three-show run in the school's massive theater would approach 10 percent of Bellingham's population at the time.

"The stars in the operettas those days were truly community stars," Griffin said.

Miss Gray was described as a demanding but supportive teacher who expected much of her students but gave them the self-confidence to succeed.

After the tribute, Nelson and Griffin were thrilled to learn that Galen Biery Jr., son of the famous Bellingham historian, had a box of more than 100 letters from the Gray family. He obtained the letters after Miss Gray died in 1973 at the age of 80.

Biery (class of 1958) was a chorus member at Bellingham High and performed in Miss Gray's last two operettas, "Oklahoma!" and "Kismet."

"I was the bad guy lead in both of them," he said.

The tribute included the playing of a rare recording of duets from two operettas, "The Merry Widow" in 1945 and "The New Moon" in 1946. While interviewing Eloise (Tweit) Rall for the book, Griffin learned that she had 78 rpm records of the duets featuring Rall (class of 1947) and Norris Brannstrom.

Rall, 80, had never listened to the records because they needed a hard-to-find turntable in which the needle moves from the inside of the record to its outer edge. Griffin found such a device at the American Museum of Radio and Electricity, and the duets were included on a CD sold with the book.

The first time Rall heard herself on the recordings was at the tribute.

"It did bring tears to my eyes," she said, "because of Norris, who is deceased."