If someone told me when I was a scrawny, scared student at Placerita Junior High in the early 1960s that I’d grow up to become many things, including a historian, I would have given them one of those You’re Crazy Askew Teenage Looks. I’ve been writing and teaching Santa Clarita history for more than a half-century plus. Oft, I’ve lamented how we celebrate the daft, the bloated, the imbecilic. We name streets after useless bureaucrats and posing generals.

It’s profoundly refreshing when we tip our hats to that rare soul who spends a lifetime joyfully toiling in ordinariness, serving his fellow man.

I’m terribly prejudiced. I’ve known Jim Tanner for 60-plus years. I had a poker face even back to that day I first met him and to share what an effect the man has on me, I still remember that morning in great detail. I had a tumultuous childhood, lived here for a while in 1958, moved around, came back, rinse, repeat.

Jim Tanner was the first person I spoke to at Placerita. Feigning disinterest, he looked at my folder, which I guess got mixed up with someone named, “Manson, Charles.”

“I’m going to take a big chance on you and put you in Track I instead of Special Ed,” said Jim.

My chart noted I had a six-digit IQ and, again, I was enough of a player/scam artist to not burst out, “Mr. Tanner — are you NUTS!?!?! I’m gifted, but not in a little yellow bus with the hydraulic lift sort of way!!”

I did the bureaucratic polite dance thingie and thanked Jim.

“Mr. Tanner,” as I called........

© Santa Clarita Valley Signal