The Little High School That Could : Teacher Urges Latinos Into College--and Is Not Rehired

SALINAS — Alisal High School counselor Pamela Bernhard recalls the day she met the new teacher: George Shirley seemed oddly out of place “in his little lawyer’s suit, with his little briefcase. He looked like he landed on the wrong planet.” Shirley, sensing her curiosity, had explained, “I’m looking for a less stressful job.”

That was in the spring of 1984. During the next two years, the balding, middle-aged newcomer would become the center of a storm that swept through the school, toppling some long-held notions about the academic potential of the Latino students whose parents labor in the strawberry and lettuce fields of Salinas.

Supporters and detractors alike acknowledge that without George Shirley and his nudging, cajoling and just plain hard sell, Alisal High’s 1986 graduating class of 225 would not have had an unprecedented 84 students accepted at four-year colleges and universities this fall, nine in the Ivy League. Some had four or five offers from prestigious schools.

Juan Pantoja, who’s at Princeton, calls it a “revolution” at Alisal High, a school he and other critics--students and faculty--contend has in the past been distinguished only by academic mediocrity and the degree to which it is segregated--85% minority, most of those Latino.

In September, 72 of those 84 students headed for college campuses, some carrying their belongings in cardboard boxes. A few had cold feet at the last minute; others had succumbed to pressures to get a job and help support the family.

Prestigious List of Schools

The schools include Harvard, Stanford, Notre Dame, Williams, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Cornell, Columbia, Georgetown, the University of Chicago, Boston University and the University of California. In addition, 65 went on to community colleges.

Statewide, the high school dropout rate for Latino students is about one-third and, at Alisal, it is more than 50%. According to 1985 data of the California Postsecondary Education Commission, only a fraction of the 53.7% of high school graduates eligible for UC, the state university system and two-year schools and independents in-state were Latinos.

But Shirley, 46, the man who started it all, is no longer at Alisal. For reasons administrators discuss only in vague generalities, he was not rehired.

There are ugly asides voiced about racism in Salinas, where Latinos, many of them migrant farm workers, have replaced the Okies who in the ‘30s settled in Alisal, now East Salinas. The Establishment, supporters of Shirley allege, was enraged that some of its youngsters, products of Salinas High (John Steinbeck’s school) and North Salinas High, both predominantly Anglo, were turned down by some of the “name” colleges.

“It’s a fact that there’s resentment there,” said Alisal Principal Gary Horsley. “I’m constantly holding my tongue.”

Shirley, choking up, said, “I keep thinking of what could have been, “ if he had had just one more year. The Class of 1986 was not “some intellectual elite that happens every four years,” he insisted, “not a group of intellectual Mexican geniuses” but just like the hundreds of bright kids for whom Alisal has been only a conduit to a job in the fields or a fast-food restaurant.

He rages at a system that, as he sees it, is writing off youngsters for whom English is, basically, a foreign language and for whom economic survival has had to come before intellectual enrichment. “We’re creating a nation of service people,” Shirley fumed. “I want us to turn out doctors and lawyers, not busboys.”

In a state with a burgeoning Latino population in its public schools (in Monterey County, home of Alisal High, almost 40%; in Los Angeles County, 44%), the saga of Alisal and of George Shirley and his kids--Juan and Corinne and Elida and the others--is more than an isolated curiosity.

Both George Shirley’s admirers and his detractors acknowledge his commitment to helping society’s less privileged. He himself overcame the poverty of a rural Tennessee farm to earn a law degree at the University of Denver and, almost inevitably, he gravitated to pro bono work. “I try to live my values,” he said.

He has campaigned for George McGovern; fought for the oil rights of reservation Indians, among whom he lived; lobbied in Washington and in Sacramento for civil rights and environmental groups; taught school in Denver and in Sacramento; instigated reform in migrant camps in Florida. By the early ‘70s, he was in Salinas as directing attorney for California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), working on civil rights and poverty issues. Similar missions then took him to rural areas of Minnesota and Florida.

Eventually, he returned to California, to a private trial practice in Monterey. Then, in November, 1983, Shirley was sitting on the steps of the Monterey County courthouse and, he remembers, “I had a mental breakdown, a total collapse. I don’t really remember a thing until I woke up in the hospital a day or so later.” The diagnosis: mental exhaustion. The treatment: anti-depressants. For a year he stayed home, taking care of his son, Bryan, 13, of whom he has joint custody.

In due time, his doctor suggested it might be therapeutic for him to return to teaching. He applied to the Salinas Union High School District.

“In some respects,” he says now, “it was kind of funny that they hired me in the first place.” A decade earlier, as a CRLA lawyer, he had been involved in several successful legal actions against the school district over the quality of education for Latinos.

Hired as a Substitute

He laughed and asked, “Would you knowingly hire a lawyer who had sued you?” But David Berteaux, Salinas Union High School District assistant superintendent for personnel, liked him and hired him as a substitute. Weeks later, Shirley was interviewed by principal Horsley and offered a one-year contract at $18,000 to teach junior history and English at Alisal.

“I wasn’t looking for trouble,” Shirley said. “And I’m a very good teacher.”

Nevertheless, from the beginning there were indications that the district had not hired itself a team player. Right off, he was asked to take a methodology course at San Jose State and, Shirley said, “I, of course, laughed. They were nonsense 20 years ago when I took them, and they’re still nonsense.”

In a school where, American literature teacher and junior varsity football coach Pat Egan contends, “We show more movies than Hollywood” in order to fill class time, Shirley had a slightly different approach. “I tried to teach them to think,” he said. “My questions were always analysis.”

Shirley’s classroom became a forum for heated debate about immigration law, the draft and de jure vs . de facto segregation. He took particular pleasure in getting kids stirred up “about what their rights are.” His classes even sent letters of challenge to the then all-Anglo school board about segregation--”Oh, they hated that,” he said rather gleefully.

His students drafted mock legislation on fair housing and employment. And, prodded by their teacher, they began to question the quality of their education. “These were kids from the wrong side of town who shouldn’t understand these things, you see,” Shirley said.

Perceived as War Zone

He and Horsley, who’s been principal for four years, had the same goal for Alisal, Shirley said: To better its image in the community. Although today it is a peaceful, clean campus, it is widely perceived as the war zone it was in the ‘60s when graffiti marred the walls, there was open conflict between gangs of street-wise Latinos and the migrant Mexicans, and a student was fatally stabbed on the front lawn.

Shirley said he felt he could work effectively within the Alisal environment and, “I followed all their silly rules as much as I could.” Those he couldn’t follow, he worked to change. And, by his own admission, there were some he just sidestepped.

There was, for example, “the Close-Up incident,” which most agree contributed to Shirley’s fall from grace. This was a financial snarl resulting from his enthusiasm for having many students experience the “Close-Up” government-in-action program in Washington in January, 1985.

“We’d never sent more than two or three kids,” Shirley said, and he arranged for 19 to go. But Shirley’s schemes for financing their trip, one of which was collecting dog food labels, fell through. Eventually, the school district had to pick up a $6,200 tab.

That “stuck in my craw,” Principal Horsley admitted.

Assistant Superintendent Berteaux said that, although he is prohibited by law from stating the reasons for Shirley not being rehired, Close-Up was in itself not it. Berteaux added, “I don’t consider George reliable. I don’t think he’s in total control of handling situations. . . . You don’t belong in a situation if you promise something and can’t come through. And I’m not talking about one isolated incident.” Still, he said, “I liked him.”

Shirley was invited back for the 1985-86 school year, but given another one-year federal-funds contract that did not count toward notching the two full academic years needed for tenure.

He knew he was “clearly expendable.” Because he believed in his students and wanted them to have a chance, he said, he began to devise a grand plan.

Last September, Shirley gave a blanket assignment to his college prep students and some handpicked general education students, about 100 youngsters in all. Each was required to write to 10 out-of-state colleges for catalogues and applications, as well as two UC campuses and one state university campus. As each would actually apply to about five schools at an average $35 cost per application, Shirley “raised hell” and got waivers of the fees. Many of the kids didn’t have postage, so Horsley permitted use of the school mail.

Shirley wasn’t going to let a matter of money stand in his way. “I saw those kids every day,” he said. “I knew their intellect, and I knew their writing skills. They’d had a lousy education.”

He knew, too, that they had to be pushed, that they all assumed they would have to go to work instead of to college, which seemed unaffordable. “Salinas is like a direct pipeline from Mexico,” Shirley said. “These are kids who work in the fields in the summer, work at Carl’s Junior at night and maybe live 11 to a two-bedroom labor camp shack.”

He had made his students sign up for the tough courses in their senior year--sociology, calculus, psychology, the solid subjects they would need to get into college.

Now, it was clear that, with cutbacks in federal aid for students at public colleges, the best bet was going to be independent schools. These offered another plus: small classes. Shirley convinced the kids: “You can try for Harvard and Princeton and Yale,” places their parents had never even heard of.

One mother, learning that her son would be going to Indiana, asked if that was nearer to Los Angeles or Sacramento.

Shirley and senior counselor Pamela Bernhard used college contacts he’d made while recruiting for poverty law programs, and they networked with Ivy League alumni in the Bay Area. They asked admissions offices to send, together with application forms, copies of essays written by candidates who had been accepted.

Faced with abysmal Standard Aptitude Test (SAT) scores--the highest combined was 1,140, the median below 600; 1,600 is perfect--Shirley, Bernhard and Pat Egan devised a strategy for selling their students on the basis of their specialness.

Bernhard sent a form letter explaining away SAT scores by spelling out students’ limited opportunities. Shirley’s letters of recommendation said, in essence, “This is a lousy school and we give our kids a lousy education. . . . It’s a segregated school and these are kids whose parents have no education at all.” It was, he acknowledges, “a direct attack on the school.”

They knew the essays were critical and that there was only one way their youngsters could compete with Establishment applicants. Shirley told students: “If it doesn’t bring a tear to my eye, do it again.” Weekend after weekend, at his house, they wrote and rewrote the essays.

“Heavy on the opener,” he would counsel them--”poor, starving farm worker is good,” and it’s not a bad idea to mention Cesar Chavez. (In case admissions officers hadn’t gotten the message, Bernhard, in follow-up calls, would remind them that she was calling from Salinas, “the lettuce capital of the world.” She remembers stunned officials asking, “Are you kidding about those SAT scores?”)

Guided With Love, Hope

In the essays, students told of parents who neither read nor write English but who had guided them with love and hope; they told of selling produce off a truck for a few dollars a day. In letters, Shirley, Bernhard and Egan stressed qualities they had learned to admire in the Latino kids: loyalty to family, perseverance, respect. Meanwhile, they kept shoring up flagging student confidence.

The payoff was big. A boy with a 990 SAT (on the second try) made the Ivy League. Another, who’d missed fifth and sixth grade to work in the fields, had a combined SAT of 600 but a 97% on his French achievement test, and won a full scholarship to a small Eastern private college, where he’s doing fine.

Shirley hand-wrote more than 200 letters of recommendation, having rejected many written by other faculty as “illiterate.”

Just filling out the applications was a challenge. “A lot of our kids are illegal,” Shirley said, “and we had parents who had worked under four different Social Security numbers and false names.” Simple questions such as “How did you get to this country?” stumped some, Bernhard said--”There wasn’t a column for ‘walked across the border at night.’ ”

Some of the institutions were “committed” to opening their doors to minority students, Shirley said, while others needed to make quotas. Whatever, he insists that, although schools had to “bend the rules” a bit, his students were accepted “because they were qualified.”

As acceptances poured in, Shirley would grab the kids out of class and take them to the principal’s office. And each piece of good news would go out over the PA system, “Today, Princeton University accepted. . . .”

“Gary Horsley loved it,” Shirley said. “He was very proud.”

Perhaps. But today Horsley says of George Shirley, “As a teacher, he never really impressed me.”

(However, in an evaluation written in March, three days before Shirley received his letter of termination, Horsley lauded Shirley for creating an “environment conducive to learning,” for his “excellent rapport” with students and “commendable” classroom performance. But he also wrote, “I cannot recommend that he be rehired.”)

‘Did a Good Job’

And, while acknowledging that Shirley was the catalyst for what happened--”He certainly did his job, and he did a good job”--Horsley is irritated that stories in the area press are “building him up like a Messiah, and doing the reverse to everybody else.”

Horsley grew up in the Alisal district of Salinas--”You read ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ OK? That was Alisal”--a grocer’s son, and worked his way up from teacher in the school district. And he insists, “We’re an excellent school. . . . There isn’t a prouder school in town.”

Nor is he ready to credit Shirley, Bernhard and Egan alone with the unprecedented success of the class of ’86. “We had an outstanding class last year, outstanding,” Horsley said, and many in the class had been targeted for college in seventh grade and were made “sensitive to, and aware of, postsecondary education.”

Further, Horsley said, “I’m so irritated at the inflated figures and the deflated figures. . . . We’ve always had Hispanic students go to four-year schools. And this isn’t the first time we’ve had a person go to Harvard.”

Horsley estimated that 35 in the class of ‘85, a class approximately the size of last year’s, went on to four-year schools and he said he doubts that more than about 60 were accepted from the class of ‘86, but Board of Education president Alden Balstad said, “I don’t dispute (Shirley’s) numbers. They got there.”

Shirley and Bernhard say the number in 1985 was closer to 11 than 35, that the school doesn’t know because it doesn’t keep track. (Horsley said he does not keep those figures.)

And, if last year’s success was a high water mark for Alisal, Horsley said, it was the result of “years of hard work that blossomed last year.”

Last year was “unique,” he acknowledged, and “it was because of the efforts of Mr. Shirley. That was very significant. And it was a very positive thing for our kids.”

But Horsley adamantly rejects charges by Shirley, Bernhard and a number of alumni that Alisal is a school where “lowered expectations” are the guiding principle and the prevailing attitude is that most students should not aspire beyond Hartnell Community College in Salinas.

Horsley acknowledged, “Academically, we still have a long ways to go. We are working on a severe dropout problem. And it’s only in the last four or five years that we’ve been able to concentrate on curriculum rather than on school climate.”

Faculty turnover is also high. “It’s hard to teach at Alisal High School,” Horsley said. “It’s like rowing upstream.” Shirley charges that, with a few exceptions, Alisal gets the “dregs” of the profession, and sacrifices quality to get Spanish-speaking faculty.

Enormous Challenges

Horsley contends his teachers are excellent but face enormous challenges--900 of the 1,450 students speak limited English and “at least three-fourths” are reading below grade level. “That’s what hangs it up” on getting them into college, he said. “They need that makeup time.”

Assistant Superintendent Berteaux said of charges that Alisal offers an inferior education, “A bunch of baloney. You don’t hear the minority community coming out (to protest), do you?” He speaks of “exemplary” foreign language programs, of full-time staff positions created so college preparatory classes with low enrollments would not have to be dropped.

“You can’t compare us with Beverly Hills,” he said, but “we’ll stack up our school with any school in the state” serving a similar population. “If we’re not in the top 10%, I’ll eat my hat.”

Horsley paused and said, “East Salinas is on the wrong side of the tracks. But these kids are beautiful kids. They have faith in themselves. The teachers have faith in them.”

He has heard the talk of inferior education at Alisal as part of a conspiracy to “keep the Mexican kids in their place.” And he responds, “Hogwash.”

Humberto Serrano, whom Shirley calls “my first great experiment,” is now a sophomore at Columbia. He was one of about 200 students and faculty who in May protested Shirley’s firing before the school board, accusing the board, “You don’t want teachers like Mr. Shirley. You want to keep this a factory for farm workers.”

Two weeks after that meeting, the board asked the valedictorian and salutatorian of each high school to select the teacher who had most affected their lives. At Alisal, Elida Marquez and Juan Pantoja chose George Shirley. In a congratulatory letter to Shirley, Superintendent Lawrence LeKander wrote, “We feel very proud of you.”

Members of the class of ‘86, fiercely loyal to George Shirley, are quick to say they were cheated at Alisal High.

Yvonne Francioli, a freshman at the University of Denver (who was also accepted at Georgetown University), wrote a letter she sent to the Salinas newspaper condemning administrators of both the high school and the district: “ . . . You were responsible for the growth of minds and you failed terribly . . . please, stop, look and listen.”

In a telephone interview, Francioli said she had been playing “catch up” from the first. ‘My grammar, oh, it’s terrible. And my math is pretty low. The other schools in our district had classes like economics and political science. We never had those because there was never anybody to push us to sign up for them. Everyone thinks the students can’t do it and the students start thinking that way, too. It’s sort of a downhill slide.”

The good teachers, she said, “get burnt out by the whole system. They just kind of slowed down.” Francioli, a minority at Alisal in that her parents are low-income Anglos, said “no one ever told me anything about college, so I just went along doing my little thing until Mr. Shirley came and said, ‘Yvonne, you’re going to apply. You’re smart, you’ll make it.’ He was an incredible teacher, the best I ever had. They only come around once in a while.”

She is so angry she said she hoped to organize a protest march on the board of education while Alisal graduates are home for the holidays.

With hard work, she said, she is pulling down B’s and C’s, majoring in international relations. Tuition, room and board comes to $15,000 a year, but she has a scholarship package that she augments by working in the school’s financial aid office.

Said Francioli: “I think the administration thinks Mr. Shirley put things in our heads. But they weren’t wrong things. They were right things.”

And Francioli, whose parents did not both finish high school, does not intend to fail: “There’s too many people depending on me at home. And there’s too many people just waiting to see if I’m going to make it.”

Juan Pantoja remembers speaking as salutatorian at his Alisal graduation night: “My parents were sitting there, listening to this speech in English. I told the audience, ‘My parents cannot understand a word I’m saying, but someday my son will be able to spell Princeton.’ ”

Then Pantoja thanked George Shirley, “for the whole class, and myself.”

Pantoja, who chose Princeton over Brown, Yale, Columbia and Cornell, all of which accepted him, admitted in a telephone interview, “I was scared to death coming here. Socially, I was culture-shocked. I miss seeing brown faces.”

He is getting A’s and B’s but, he said, “studying at least twice as hard as other kids here.” He assesses his Alisal education as “very, very mediocre. I’m such a slow reader. The teachers at Alisal didn’t ask us to read as much as we should have.”

Looking back, he concludes, “It was a lousy education. They didn’t demand much of us. Mr. Shirley motivated us, he encouraged us.” Pantoja does not tar all Alisal teachers with the same brush. There were good ones, he said, dedicated ones, “but the majority were lousy.”

Born in Rural Mexico

The seventh in a family of nine children, all born in rural Mexico, he moved with his parents to Salinas when he was about 6. Both his mother and his father pick strawberries. “The younger ones, we are the luckier ones,” he said. “My older brothers had to help support the family so they couldn’t go to college.”

At Princeton, a year’s tuition, room and board, plus travel expenses add up to $18,500, more than a picker earns in a year. But Pantoja has a financial-aid package that pays all but $2,000, for which he has a loan. Through a work-study program, he earns pocket money.

Pantoja says summers spent picking strawberries motivated him to study. He said, “After one hour (in the field) I almost died. Can you imagine, my parents working eight hours, six days a week?”

Will he come back to Salinas after graduation from Princeton? “I’m not sure,” Pantoja said, “but even if I don’t go back to stay, I’ll definitely go back, maybe to do what Mr. Shirley did for us.”

Corinne Lopez, reached by telephone in her dorm at Cornell in upstate New York, said she now realizes that Alisal kids are victimized by a “go easy on them” attitude. At Salinas’ other high schools, she said, “When they have a paper due, they have a paper due. They can’t get an extension, and another extension, and finally not do it at all. They don’t expect much of us at Alisal and when we don’t do it, they’re not disappointed.”

She says she is doing “OK” academically at Cornell, where she is studying industrial labor relations, and better than that socially--she has a steady boyfriend. Financial aid covers all but $2,000 of the annual cost of $14,000; her parents pay $1,000 and she is working as a 4-H leader for low-income youngsters in Ithaca to pay the rest.

Until Shirley came along, she said, the Latino kids “were kind of intimidated. We just wanted to get out of high school. Now we know things weren’t right at Alisal.”

Lopez, first in her family to go to college, said her personal goal is to see that her 5-year-old brother gets a private-school education. “By then, I should be working and I could afford to send him.”

In teacher Pat Egan’s view, Shirley was “a great teacher” who got into trouble because of a widespread “San Jose State was good enough for me” attitude among the other faculty. “They thought he was thumbing his nose at them.”

But Marshall Brewer, a history teacher who’s been in the district 20 years, said, “I don’t think we’ve lost as much as some people think we have.” Brewer, who is “really irritated” by Shirley’s allegations about Alisal’s teachers, said, “For the longest time, I thought George just had too big a heart and didn’t know how to say no. I don’t know if that’s the case anymore.”

Whatever, Brewer concluded, “I think if the Close-Up incident hadn’t happened, he’d still be working at Alisal High School.”

Brewer, who acknowledges Shirley’s achievement gave Alisal “a real boost,” does not believe Shirley’s activism alone cost him his job. A former union representative, Brewer said, “To be honest, I don’t like the superintendent and I don’t like a couple of the assistant superintendents . . . but I’ve never ever seen them even try to punish someone for activism.”

Shirley disagrees. “They felt I was too dangerous,” he said. With his lawyer’s mind, hadn’t he turned to the ACLU and made the sponsoring American Legion back down when Alma Marquez was denied the right to Alisal’s representative to the Girls State in Sacramento in June because she wasn’t a citizen? “Who needs the hassle,” he asked, “when you can have an automaton?”

“You have to give credit where credit is due,” Brewer said of Shirley, but he spoke of a “love-hate relationship” between Shirley and other faculty. He mentioned that not more than half the faculty signed a petition asking that he be rehired but added that many Alisal teachers would never sign any petition.

“But write all the good things you want about George,” he said. “I don’t mind defending George, because there’s some good things to defend, but in order to defend George, there’s a tendency to put other people down.”

‘Very Prejudiced People’

Brewer, the son of “fruit tramps,” migrant workers who came to Salinas from Texas in 1941 and as a kid lived only three blocks from the high school, said: “There are a lot of very prejudiced people in Salinas, no doubt about it.”

School board president Alden Balstad, an architect/planner, said the board has “had considerable impact” on the local segregation problem by pressuring the City Council and the zoning board to deal with minority isolation in Salinas. But, despite the disproportionate number of minorities at Alisal, which is surrounded by substandard and low-income housing, Balstad said, Alisal is providing “an equal education.”

Salinas is historically a grower-dominated community, but it is in flux, with companies such as Nestle and Smuckers broadening the power base, together with small electronics firms. The population has boomed in two decades from 30,000 to 90,000, and most of the newcomers are the Latinos.

Six or seven years ago, Brewer said, “We realized no matter what we did, how hard we worked, the district was not going to desegregate Alisal.” (Salinas High is 52% Anglo, North Salinas High, 55% Anglo. The district is 55% minority).

Pat Egan laughs and says that George Shirley is the only person he knows who on the same day was honored as Alisal’s employee of the month and received a letter of termination. That was last March 15.

Shirley said his request for reconsideration, by his own admission “an acerbic letter” in which he stated, “I think I’m a damned good teacher, and I think you know it,” brought a suggestion from the district that he undergo a psychological exam. “It was a straw man,” Shirley contends. “It was months after their decision was made.”

He laughed and said, “I’m the only one in that district who can prove I’m sane,” a reference to a physician’s clearance he said is in his personnel file. For some time, Shirley said, he’d been getting messages third-hand that he was “too aggressive.”

But board president Balstad said Shirley did not keep appointments, as he had agreed, for evaluation by board-chosen psychiatrists. “It would have made a difference if he had. The board wanted some assurance in certain areas we were concerned about.” Shirley contends he complied with every request except to open his medical file pre-dating employment by the district.

“Mr. Shirley had a real talent,” Balstad said, and it was “unfortunate” that the board had to make the decision (which was unanimous) not to rehire him. “He contributed to placing a lot of students who didn’t feel they could do it.” But, Balstad said, the board had to place the welfare of the students first--”We’re not saying there was anything that did happen, but if you cut corners in doing things, if you don’t feel that the rules are meant to apply uniformly to students and teachers, students could be damaged. . . . “

Shirley said, “The job wasn’t that important to me, but the issues are.” He had had three goals when he started at Alisal, he said: To get the kids into college, to change the image of the school in the community and, through resulting publicity, to help desegregate it.

His friend Pamela Bernhard, 42, in her 16th year in the district, contends that her part in Shirley’s grand plan led to her being demoted from senior counselor to sophomore counselor, which Horsley denies.

Some of the staff told Horsley he’d made a mistake, Bernhard said, but “they weren’t going to take a chance on antagonizing the superintendent, or the school board.”

The class of ’86 voted to have George Shirley as last year’s commencement speaker which, Shirley said with some satisfaction, “terrified the board.” He choked up, remembering the emotion of that night. “Most of those families didn’t have the slightest idea what I’d been saying,” he said, still they gave him a standing ovation.

George Shirley hasn’t plotted his future; for the past few months he has been attending to the estate of an uncle who had lived in San Jose.

Shirley does not worry about whether his kids will make it in college. He said, “If your choice is picking lettuce in Salinas for the rest of your life or going to Princeton, you’re not going to fail.”

Meanwhile, he is writing a book and also is putting together a handbook offering tips on the “ins and outs” of applying to college.

And Shirley has time to reflect. “Don’t write a story about what a success it was,” he said. “We’ve won a battle, but we’ve lost the war.”