Claire Suguro, 88, pioneering teacher in Seattle schools

A couple of years ago, when Cheryl Chow was sworn in as a Seattle School Board member, she asked her first-grade teacher, Claire Suguro, to participate in the ceremony. A few years earlier, she had lured Miss Suguro out of retirement to counsel students when Chow was interim principal at Franklin High School, and later at Garfield High School.

"She'd always been one of my heroes," said Chow. "She made a very big impression on me because she was the only Asian teacher I had in my whole career going through Seattle Public Schools. I just thought, 'Wow, this is cool.' "

Miss Suguro, believed to be the first Japanese-American teacher hired by the Seattle district, died April 18 at age 88. She was with the district from 1950 until her retirement in 1993. The first dozen years were spent as a first-grade teacher at Bailey Gatzert Elementary School, not far from Seattle's Chinatown International District. The rest of her years were at Ingraham High School in North Seattle, where she became head counselor.

"She was petite, but she was tough," Chow said of the woman she considered a role model and a friend. "I was so impacted by her at such an early age."

Born in Seattle, Miss Suguro grew up in what was then called Japan Town, on the fringes of the International District. She was a student at Gatzert, too, then went on to graduate from Franklin High. Her family, anxious to immerse her in traditional Japanese culture, sent her after graduation to study in Japan.

She was a student in Tokyo when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and she spent much of World War II dodging American air raids, harbored by a private school where she taught other students English, according to her niece, Alison Miller of Seattle. Miss Suguro, who never married, raised Miller as a daughter from infancy.

It was not until after the war that Miss Suguro returned home to earn a degree in education from Seattle University in 1950, then was hired by the school district. She did her student teaching in the same Gatzert classroom she had been in as a first-grader, and under her own first-grade teacher, said her niece.

"She was highly energetic, fiercely independent and very focused. She also was frugal and old-fashioned, and intensely private," the niece said.

Miss Suguro had served on a Seattle University alumni board, and was on the board of the Medina Children's Service. She also was affiliated with a number of academic associations. In 1994, she was honored by the local Japanese American Citizens League as a local female pioneer, and also honored in 2000 as a pioneering Asian-American educator by the Northwest Asian Weekly newspaper.

A memorial service is scheduled for 2 p.m. May 8 in the Chapel of St. Ignatius on the Seattle University campus.