Former students, colleagues and friends of the Federal Way language arts teacher Jean Hill Chase will gather on Saturday, October 22 at the Sacajawea Junior High Library to share memories, photos and stories of a popular and much-beloved teacher.

Jean Hill Chase died on August 25, 2005 in Fall City, Washington.

A Decatur High School and Sacajawea Middle School faculty member from 1973 until her retirement in 1988, Chase inspired and motivated hundreds of students over the years through her dynamic teaching style and exceptional commitment to learning, several of her former colleagues told the Federal Way News last week.

"When kids left her class, not only were they extremely well educated but they would never forget the true lessons or Jean herself," said Robert Gabrio, a former teacher at Sacajawea who worked side by side with Chase. "She was a fantastic motivator of kids, they loved her. Jean was a sort of energy generator that you plugged into."

"Every year around Easter, she would get her students to make huge bunny ears from cardboard and paper, and lead them on a bunny hop around the school grounds, just for fun. Now she taught ninth graders, so these were usually highly self-conscious kids, but there they were, happily acting silly with Jean," laughed Mary Eberling, another former Sacajawea teacher who taught in the classroom next door to Chase for 15 years.

Eberling said that Chase, a superb storyteller, was constantly coming up with innovative ways to get students excited; for example, she developed an archeology class and would come to the school on weekends to bury artifacts around the grounds and then lead her students during the week on excavations.

"In teaching Shakespeare, she created a mock-trial and her students tried Lady Macbeth for murder," said Robert Gabrio, "I learned many novel teaching methods from Jean."

At the last assembly of the 1988 school year at Sacajawea, the school band struck up the tune, "The Stripper," Chase came on stage and did a comic dance that brought down the house. The applause lasted for ten minutes straight as she took her final bow as a teacher in Federal Way.

"Mrs. Chase encouraged us to formulate our own ideas and cultivate our own opinions," said a former student of Chase's during the 1982-83 school year, Erik Larson, who now owns several South Sound insurance agencies.

"The only thing more colorful than the outfits she typically wore was her sparkling and feisty personality. She genuinely cared for us -- and not just when it came to an English grade, but who we were as individuals," said Larson.

Jean Hill was born in Philadelphia in 1927. Her father was a lawyer who practiced in Philadelphia and Washington D.C. and her mother worked as a schoolteacher, as did Chase's grandmother. Jean spent her childhood attending private parochial boarding schools and living on Chincoteague Island, off the coast of Virginia, where her maternal and paternal grandparents cultivated oysters and the Hill family traced its settlement on the island back to 1692.

Chase received her undergraduate degree in English Literature from Dunbarton College in Washington, D.C.

In 1949, Chase moved to Washington State, the home of her first husband, Roger Gray, whom she met while he was stationed in Virginia.

After 21 years of marriage, they divorced and Chase took the first teaching job she was offered, with the Federal Way schools.

Jean went back to school herself later in life and received her master's in anthropology at the University of Washington.

In 1975, she married Larry Chase, the father of one her students. They celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary earlier this year.

After retiring from teaching, Jean and Larry moved to Ocean Shores, Washington, where she became a popular speaker and storyteller for the Ocean Shores Chamber of Commerce. She also wrote a weekly column, "Geoduck Tales" for the North Coast News.

"She could pick up an object on the beach and instantly create a story around it, she had a wonderful imagination," remembered Joan Payne, executive director of the Ocean Shores Chamber of Commerce, who belonged to a camping club with the Chases.

In 1992, Chase published a children's book, Georgie of Assateague, set on the island off the coast of Virginia famed for its wild horses and featuring her own illustrations.

When Larry developed Alzheimer's, the Chases moved to Panorama City, a retirement home in Lacey. There Chase continued to be extremely social and involved with clubs and friends. However, as Larry's illness progressed, Chase's son David Gray, who lives in Fall City, convinced her to move to a rural cabin in that area and Larry to an Alzheimer's facility nearby.

Jean Chase had been on dialysis for the past few years and her health was slowly deteriorating, but she still kept in frequent contact with friends.

However, when she visited Larry in March of 2005 and he no longer recognized her, Jean Chase made the decision to end her thrice-weekly dialysis treatments.

She died five months later.

"We had been trying to contact her for some time, and nobody knew she had died. It was terrible. Such a gregarious and vivacious women, with so many friends, dying alone in the woods," said friend and colleague Evelyn Schanzenbach.

"That's why it's so important to her friends now that we gather to celebrate her, this amazing woman who lived among us, and now is gone. She deserves that."