Jim Glennon, teacher and professor for fifty years, retired from Highline Community College at the end of this last Spring Quarter.

After a career that introduced him to around 16,000 students and stretched from rural Rosalia, Washington, to Mt. Rainier High in Des Moines, and Highline, he is finally retiring to spend more time with his wife.

This is no small task for him though; "The students are my battery," Glennon explains. "If I'm not feeling well, and I could make it to school, I felt better. As a result, I've missed around 15 days in 50 years. ...All of my awards came because of my students, not because of me."

He realized his love for teaching when he began his career in Centralia, both as a history and economics teacher as well as a football coach. Though he soon realized that he didn't know the subjects he taught as well as he had thought he did, his dedication to his profession led him to take summer classes. "If I knew how little I knew that first year, I would never have done it," Glennon said.

"But every summer I took classes to strengthen my background knowledge."

After moving to the Highline area to teach at Mt. Rainier in 1965, he continued his effort to engage his students by introducing debates on current events into his history classes.

"The key is relevance - and what could be more relevant than last night's news?" Glennon declared. He began taping the news in the evening, editing clips of it onto a VHS tape, and showing it in class the next day. In this fashion, he covered events such as developments in the Vietnam War and the Kent State shootings of 1970 as they happened.

"If I can get you into a heated discussion, then I can get you thinking," Glennon said. "I will do anything to get my students to be engaged and learning. If you're in my class, you're going to do something. I'm not going to let you vegetate."

He continued with this method which was successful to the point where an history club was formed because Glennon had to cut debates short due to the class period ending.

The debates, though, led Glennon to take the opposing view of his students for the sake of argument. "One year the students were convinced I was a far-right conservative, and the next year the next class thought for sure I was an ardent liberal," he explained. "If you like chocolate, I like strawberry," he said in regard to his in-class views. "If you like strawberry, I like chocolate. If you like both, I like vanilla."

Former Mt. Rainier student Dwight Perry remembers Glennon's presence in the classroom and on the football field.

"He was up on the times and he brought everyone in on that. ...He was no wallflower on giving his opinions. It was like a college class that way," Perry recalls.

This last year, though, Glennon has felt himself slow down. His contract with Highline was only for one year at a time. It was renewed 16 times.

His wife's second stroke made him realize that he was too old to continue teaching.

"I started falling behind in planning for my classes. I didn't realize how much my wife did to release me so I could prepare," Glennon said.

He usually went in on Sunday to ready himself for the upcoming week.

However, one Sunday came where, Glennon explained: "I walked into my office and said 'I don't have anything left, so I turned around, locked the door, and went home and told my wife I was retiring the next day."

Despite the numerous offers from Highline to simply lighten his course load, Glennon insisted on retirement, and officially did so this summer.

"I needed to spend more time with my wife. I don't have as much energy as I used to," he declared. However, he won't soon be forgotten by Perry and all the others whose lives he helped guide during his 50- year career.