His life has been a series of happenstances that led to a successful and passionate career in teaching, and now after 35 years at Mill Creek Middle School, Eugene Kolding is passing his conductor’s baton to a new teacher.
Kolding, 66, is the last remaining faculty member to have taught at Mill Creek since it was Kent Junior High School.
Born in the central California town of Patterson, Kolding joined the Air Force after high school, and then returned to Modesto, Calif., for junior college. He then received a teaching degree from George Fox University in Newberg, Ore.
“Since then it’s all been instrument classes or computer classes,” he says.
Kolding started with piano, but his training as a music teacher required him to learn a large number of different instruments, including brass, woodwinds and percussion. The hardest? The oboe, he says, because of the slippery and precise finger positions needed to play the instrument.
While at George Fox, Kolding rediscovered his faith in what he says was a religious experience at a camp where he taught choir.
Every Friday the clergy would hold a time for church members to give themselves to the lord.
“I wasn’t going to do that because no one asked me if I was a Christian, they just wanted me to teach,” Kolding says.
But on one particular night, he followed his pupil to the altar anyway and placed his left hand on her shoulder.
“All of a sudden, this (left) hand went completely numb,” he says. “It went up the arm to the shoulder. And that scared the bejeezus out of me.”
The numbness was accompanied by a vision, he says, of two armies fighting a great battle.
“The more they fought, the more this (left arm) went numb,” Kolding says.
As he began to accept the lord into his heart, he says, his arm gradually restored sensation.
“And that affected me for my whole life,” Kolding says.
His work took him to Elkton, Ore., then to Lakeview, where he taught at every level of academics. Following a seven-year stint, Kolding took a temporary hiatus from teaching to work privately, and returned later to Mill Creek, where he’s been ever since.
After 45 years of teaching, Kolding is ready for retirement as a stroke earlier this year slowed him down. It forced him to take his school’s sick leave, “but sometimes God has to whack me upside the head,” he says.
Strokes will almost always, if non-fatal, leave the victim crippled for many years or even for life, often unable to use a side of their body. Kolding walked away almost completely unscathed.
“The doctor told me, both at Tacoma General and Valley Medical Center, ‘You are a miracle.'”
It was faith that led him to Mill Creek and encouraged him to continue his work with children.
“When God wants something to happen, it’s gonna happen,” he says.
Kolding finds his passion for teaching from the life lessons he passes on to his students beyond simply how to play an instrument or read music. Even now in his classes, he tries to impress on them the value of commitment and dedication to a craft or project, whether it’s playing sports or instruments.
After his retirement, he and his wife plan to go to the Grand Canyon. He wants to volunteer with his church and help with M-Power, a social services organization that use the arts to help reduce gang violence.
The options are open for him, he says, and as long as it can combine his faith and love of teaching, he’ll be content and doing what he enjoys.
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