Fred Paulenich
This story is the last of a series on the 2024 inductees into the Brookfield Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame.
It’s 1955 and a 14-year-old boy has stood up in front of the audience at the Brookfield Optimist speech contest and failed to deliver the speech he had worked so hard at. He simply froze.
The boy was “overwhelmed by humiliation” – his words – at the failure. But, has this boy failed? Not in the mind of the speech coordinator, James E. Hoffman Jr. Hoffman takes the boy aside, talks to him and gives him another opportunity to deliver the speech, albeit after the contest is over. This time, the boy succeeds. Hoffman wanted the boy “to see what you are capable of doing,” the boy said.
The boy was Fred Paulenich, Brookfield High Class of 1959, and he forever carried what Hoffman did for him into a career as a high school and college educator, coach and mentor for students and other educators.
Although Paulenich’s son, Marc, was never his father’s student in a classroom sense, he obviously was taught many of the same lessons that Paulenich tried to relate to those who sat in his class.
“I learned early on that there’s no failure, just feedback,” Marc Paulenich said.
There was many a weekend when Marc was growing up that he would go into his parents’ bedroom on a Saturday to say good morning and he would find his father hunched over a desk grading papers, giving each paper a thorough reading, thoughtful analysis and constructive criticism.
“For my dad, it was never about the grades earned,” Marc said. “It was about providing thoughtful critiques and teaching his students to think critically, to communicate better. At times, it felt like tough love. His commitment to their growth would set a standard that these students would carry on for the rest of their lives. I’ve heard that played back to him many, many times.”
Aside from Hoffman, Paulenich said, four Brookfield teachers inspired him to pursue a career in education: Gar Aikens, who taught speech; Tony Mason, American history; Charles Sindledecker, audio-visual aids; and Anne Berardi, English.
Paulenich spent nearly 40 years at Crestwood High School teaching English, often with unconventional materials, such as comic books, newspaper clippings, magazine articles and catalogs. When it came to more traditional literature, Paulenich was want to leave the school-selected textbook collect dust on a shelf and choose authors and writings he felt better suited his purpose. It was not enough to simply help his student get Hawthorne or Thoreau, Marc said.
“For my dad, it was about the opportunity to fundamentally alter the trajectory of all the students that he mentored,” Marc said.
Fred Paulenich said he “diligently attended to the needs of 1,000 students” over his career. He used his off hours and summers creating “a lifetime of devotion to scholarship and historical research.”
“He sought to be an expert in the language arts, to be knowledgeable of all the great authors, to be able to analyze text and composition and how it was organized, and how to structure an argument,” Marc said. “He wasn’t just up there schooling people on Oxford comma usage.”
As a youngster, Marc said, he didn’t necessarily understand why his dad sometimes chose study and work – Fred Paulenich sometimes taught college classes in the evenings and on Saturdays – over family times but now realizes what an act of love it was for his father to want to better himself so that he could better interact with his students. He considered his studying and teaching “noble” and “vital,” Mark said.
“My dad taught us that, by acting as if what we do makes a difference, it does,” he said.
Fred Paulenich died March 23 at age 83.
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The Brookfield Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame Class of 2025 will be inducted at 10 a.m. Sept. 20 at Avalon Country Club-Squaw Creek in Vienna. Tickets are available at the Brookfield Board of Education officer, 579 Bedford Road, Brookfield, or from Diane Riefstahl, 724-346-9615. Deadline to purchase tickets is Sept. 6. The new class members are Morgan Bonekovic, Dr. Taylor Brooks, Dave English, Gary Lees, Wardell Jefferson and posthumous inductee Lucille Lenore Flemon Downs.
