Bob Gallagher

I met Bob Gallagher in the spring of 1973, in Cocoa , Florida and we hit it off right away. He was from Northern California and I from SoCal. We ended up being roommates. If I had taken the scholarship offered by Stanford University , we might have been roommates there too.

Bob saw the world through ironic glasses. He could imitate anyone, speak English with many foreign accents and had body language that would rival Steve Martin. In fact, Leo Durocher, who was the Astros manager at that time, and always wanted to be the center of attention, was jealous of Bob because me made us laugh all the time and took attention away from Leo.

Bob was a great athlete. He had a beautiful swing (baseball and golf), had good speed and a good arm. The one thing he lacked was raw power and that one thing made him a part-timer during most of his four years in the big leagues. Put him on a basketball court and he'd have you zigging when he was zagging. Trivia. Forget it – he knew everything. One time we played golf on an off day in New York and he didn't have clubs. There were no left-handed rental clubs available. So he rented right handed clubs and shot 90. With his own sticks, he seldom shot over 80.

Bob liked to listen to the Firesign Theater, a beat generation comedy team. We used to listen to them on the road and sometimes we would punch up a tape and do our own skits. But baseball wasn't kind to the Gallagher family. “We had to bounce around a lot and that's hard to do when you have little kids. But I really liked the wild times in the minor leagues. It was like Bull Durham. But that's when I was playing every day. If I didn't get a hit, I knew I would still be in there the next day. I got into a rhythm that I never found in the big leagues because I only played about once every week or two. I still think I could have been a decent everyday player, but I never got the chance.”

What's worse, he played when you had to have four years service to qualify for a pension and he ended up just short of that mark. About two years after he retired they changed the requirement to one day. He was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the one thing that sticks with me, after all these years is his heart. It was, and is, always in the right place.

After baseball, Bob and his wife Renee decided to move to Santa Cruz, California, an idyllic town on the coast about 90 miles south of San Francisco. “My wife had some family there and we liked the climate. But it really wasn't any one thing. I wasn't keen on getting in the rat race, and so we just decided to live here and find a way to scratch it out. We just kind of locked arms and said, ‘let's go for it.'” A lot of people wanted to live in Santa Cruz , but there were very few jobs to be had. So, they opened a day care center and he went back to school and got his teaching certificate and landed a job at Santa Cruz High School . At last he was in the right place at the right time.

“I like teaching right away,” he said. “It was like being down in the trenches with the kids. Kind of a blue collar, we're in it together type of atmosphere.” I asked him if his talent for comedy helped him in class. “No question,” he said. “I don't plan the comedy, but I think about it all the time. How can I make these kids pay attention? How can I make them laugh and learn something at the same time? Sure, I do a stand up comic act sometimes, but it's spontaneous. I also make them do it. I give them roles of famous people in history that we are studying and they have go get up and play their parts. Maybe I'm just a ham, but I think I have a way of subliminally getting them to learn what I'm trying to teach them.”

But Bob Gallagher has been able to follow his own act quite well, thank you. He has been voted “Teacher of the Year for twenty straight years at Santa Cruz H. S.. In eight of those years, he took a group of top students to Washington D.C. in the summer to see the sights and talk about our government. “There would be about 200 of us in a hotel and it there was real camaraderie,” he said. “We got to see congress in session and one year we got a private audience with Henry Kissinger. I haven't taken the trip for a few years, but kids still come back and tell me that was the best thing they did in high school.”

“One thing I think about a lot, he said, is that these kids are our future and they need to get a good education and get wired in. I still remember something one of my students said many years ago and it still inspires me. She said, ‘You get so excited about this stuff, Mr. Gallagher. That's why we get excited too. It's like it really means something.'”