Late in the evening of my 50th birthday last month, lying in the dark with my 1-year-old son sleeping soundly on my chest, I opened the email app on my phone to discover a most unexpected artifact of my youth.
The subject line read simply “for your information,” but it was the name in the sender field that jolted me awake: “Fred Trupiano.”
Trupiano — “Trup,” we used to call him — was my teacher in a sixth-grade enrichment program at Liholiho Elementary School in Kaimuki. I hadn’t seen or heard from him in 38 years, though I’ve thought of him often. On the odd occasion that I’m asked to talk about how I became a writer, the first thought that comes to mind is always the same: Trup.
Unaware of the fortuitous timing of his note, Trupiano reintroduced himself, explained that he had been going through some papers when he came across a story I had written for his class, and retyped the story in full.
“I thought you might enjoy reading it,” he wrote.
The story itself, a goofy thing about traveling through time, made me cringe. But the memory of its composition was sweetly familiar.
As Trupiano recalled in his email, “you didn’t use much punctuation back then and your handwriting left an awful lot to be desired.” And so he had sat me down next to him to read the paper aloud while he tapped it out on a manual typewriter, the two of us editing as we went along.
Trupiano was just 40 years old at the time, though such estimation was beyond my 12-year-old brain then. Already bald and possessed with an old-school linebacker’s build and a voice that could halt a cafeteria food fight with one bellowing “Knock it off,” he was an imposing presence, one that nonetheless bore the patience of a monk and the encouraging light of a career educator.
Born and raised in Detroit, Trupiano earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a teaching certificate from Wayne State University. After a brief stint as a substitute teacher in the Detroit school system, he took advantage of newly introduced jet travel to Hawaii for what he expected would be a one-year hiatus.
One year stretched to two and three and four as Trupiano taught at schools in Wahiawa and Kalihi, eventually landing at Liholiho, where he would spend the next 27 years.
“Hawaii became my home and I have no regrets making that decision,” he said. “I can’t imagine having had a 30-year teaching career in Detroit! Hawaii was the right decision for me.”
It certainly was for the generations of students who passed through his sixth grade, homeroom and enrichment classes over the years.
In late 1970s Trupiano took advantage of administrative support for targeted enrichment programs to start one of his own. While such programs varied greatly in focus, from arts to cultural activities, Trupiano knew from the beginning that he wanted his to be academically based. To make his enrichment program for writing worthwhile, Trupiano studied college texts and designed his program to help students build skills that aligned with collegiate expectations.
I entered the enrichment program an awkward, unmoored kid undistinguished in the classroom and on the athletic field. To Trupiano, though, I was someone with potential. He liked my attempts to find the best words to describe things. He recognized the nascent thought processes hidden within all that illegible scribble.
As the year progressed he gave me extra writing assignments and directed me to stories and authors he thought might spark my imagination. He taught me how to read from the perspective of a writer and encouraged me to develop a feel for things like structure, tone and word choice.
I left Trupiano’s class with everything yet to learn but also with a bit of confidence and a desire to make something of that potential he identified. I had something to hold on to, and that meant the world to me.
Trupiano headed the program until it was discontinued after 13 years. Eschewing opportunities to transition into an administrative role (“too bureaucratic”), he took on a variety of new tasks, including developing curriculum for an early computer class and creating a system for evaluating math performance. He retired in 1995.
About a week after exchanging emails, Trupiano and I met for lunch at Big City Diner.
There was no mistaking him, the still-straight back and broad shoulders, the voice softened by age but still clear and distinct, the smile as quick and warm as ever. He told me about the long-deferred travels he finally took after retirement, long weeks roaming solo across his ancestral Italy, wind-down stopovers in Paris, a pair of trips to Shanghai with a Chinese family he had befriended in Hawaii. I told him about my stops in journalism, my studies in English and my work teaching English at Kapiolani Community College, just up the road from our old school.
And I thanked him, awkwardly, profusely.
I asked, clumsily, if I could write about him.
“Please don’t make me out to be something special,” he said.
Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.
