The most difficult moment for John Chapin is going to be when he turns in his keys.
“The access that you had to go anywhere at any time, do anything in the school, is over,” says Chapin, who is retiring from teaching and coaching at South Portland High School after 36 years. “You can’t go into the building any time. It’s the final act.”
The students will be long gone by then and the arduous task of cleaning out his room will be finished. All that’ll be left will be turning in the keys and walking out the door.
“I hope I remember what all the keys go to, so I can tell them,” jokes Chapin, 60, who will leave in his wake decades of memories and thousands of students that he had an impact on, both as a history teacher and a track coach.
“John looks at every child on the team as an individual,” says Red Riots head boys coach Paul Brogan, himself a veteran of 37 years. “The emphasis is on teaching each child each day.”
Chapin grew up on Portland’s Munjoy Hill and played tennis at Portland High School before heading to Orono to attend UMaine. He left there five years later with a master’s in history, but that wasn’t the plan when he arrived.
“I thought I wanted to do broadcasting, radio and television. That’s a very competitive and tough business,” Chapin says. “I always liked history, but you can’t open a store and sell history, so the next best thing is to try to teach other people to like it.”
After a stint as a substitute in the Portland system and a few months as a second-grade teacher, Chapin applied to South Portland in 1970 and was offered a contract, which included a coaching assignment, as was customary at the time.
“You were hired to do both and in my hiring interview they said, ‘We have an assistant track position open for you.’ I said, ‘I don’t know much about track. I played tennis in high school and college.’ They said, ‘The tennis coach here is an institution. You wouldn’t mind coaching track, would you?'”
And so began Chapin’s tenure as an assistant, first to Bill Blood and, since 1973, to Brogan. Through the decades the duo has shepherded the Riots boys squad through good and not-so-good.
“We had won a state championship in the season before I got there,” Chapin says, “and then we won four in a row. I thought it was always going to be like that – a piece of cake. And then I discovered it was a cyclical thing, but the bottom never dropped out.”
Altogether, Chapin was part of six indoor and 10 outdoor state championship teams. Dave Kahill was a member of the 1991 and 1992 outdoor championship teams and is now the boys track coach at Westbrook High School as well as a colleague of Chapin’s in South Portland’s history department.
“When I was an athlete, he always had a neat way of getting the kids to feel good about themselves,” says Kahill. “And now as a colleague, it’s fabulous. I learn from him little secrets of teaching, getting kids motivated, balancing time.”
Through parts of four decades, Chapin has been around long enough to notice a shift in the attitudes of young people.
“Societal dynamics have changed a bit. The kids today are more challenging of rules and authority figures,” he says. “The genie is out of the bottle. It’s never going back, and you have to deal with it. You just hope that you have the perspective to know what you can change, change that; know what you can’t change, leave it alone; and with any luck you’ll know the difference.”
As an educator and coach, Chapin seems to have struck the right balance.
“He’s a great guy and a great coach,” says senior Tom McCoubrey, a shot putter and discus thrower. “He’ll really be missed teaching and coaching at South Portland High School. He’s seen a lot of people come through there, and he’s done a lot of good things for the school.”
One of the students that touched Chapin the most was a blind boy named David Meyers, who ignored seemingly insurmountable obstacles and joined the track team in the mid-1970s. Meyers eventually died from the cancer affecting his sight, and Chapin named his second son, who is now 26, after him. He also has an older son named John, who is 28.
Though he’s leaving South Portland High School, Chapin isn’t hanging up his history book just yet. Through a program administered by Central Texas University, he’ll be teaching college-level history – but not in Texas. Instead, his students will be US Navy personnel.
“I’ll be teaching for (Central Texas) at sea,” he says. “They offer a float education for kids who are 19, 20, and are looking to start college or continue their education at a time when there’s not a lot going on other than eating and sleeping and doing their jobs.”
The Navy will pay for Chapin to fly to ports where ships are about to head out for weeks or months at a time. He may, for example, spend a few months on an aircraft carrier that goes from Virginia to Australia, where he’ll have the option to return home or to connect with another ship.
“They told me they’d never deploy me for longer than six months,” Chapin says, laughing.
He also hopes to continue an interest he developed years ago in collecting art and visiting museums. He owns a landscape that was recently chosen for publication.
It was a work of art that resulted in Chapin having the same classroom the entire time he was at South Portland. In his second year teaching, a student named Tom Hill painted a mural of a 1926 Wills St. Claire automobile on one of the room’s walls. In years to come, when room assignments were handed out, it was decided that Chapin should stay with the mural.
But all of that time in one room has left a large collection of material that needs to be sorted through and packed up. So Chapin figures that, if classes end on June 14, it’ll take him until about June 20 to clear everything out.
Only then will he make his way to the main office to hand over those keys.
“One of the happiest and saddest things is for him to be leaving,” says Kahill. “Congratulations to him, but it’ll be a huge void in the South Portland community and the track world without him.”
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