Mountain Views News, Combined Edition Saturday, November 30, 2019

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Mountain Views-News Saturday, November 30, 2019 


SCHOOL DIRECTORY

Alverno Heights Academy

200 N. Michillinda Sierra Madre, Ca. 91024

(626) 355-3463 Head of School: Julia V. Fanara

E-mail address: jfanara@alvernoheights.org

Arcadia High School

180 Campus Drive Arcadia, CA 91007

Phone: (626) 821-8370, Principal: Brent Forsee

bforsee@ausd.net

Arroyo Pacific Academy

41 W. Santa Clara St. Arcadia, Ca, 

(626) 294-0661 Principal: Phil Clarke

E-mail address: pclarke@arroyopacific.org

Barnhart School

240 W. Colorado Blvd Arcadia, Ca. 91007

(626) 446-5588 

Head of School: Ethan Williamson

Kindergarten - 8th grade

website: www.barnhartschool.org

Bethany Christian School

93 N. Baldwin Ave. Sierra Madre, Ca. 91024

(626) 355-3527 

Preschool-TK-8th Grade

Principal: Dr. William Walner

website: www. bcslions.org

Clairbourn School

8400 Huntington Drive

San Gabriel, CA 91775

Phone: 626-286-3108 ext. 172

FAX: 626-286-1528

E-mail: jhawes@clairbourn.org

Foothill Oaks Academy

822 E. Bradbourne Ave., Duarte, CA 91010

(626) 301-9809

Principal: Nancy Lopez

www.foothilloaksacademy.org

office@foothilloaksacademy.org

Frostig School

971 N. Altadena Drive Pasadena, CA 91107

(626) 791-1255

Head of School: Jenny Janetzke

Email: jenny@frostig.org

The Gooden School

192 N. Baldwin Ave. Sierra Madre, Ca. 91024

(626) 355-2410 

Head of School, Jo-Anne Woolner

website: www.goodenschool.org

High Point Academy

1720 Kinneloa Canyon Road 

Pasadena, Ca. 91107 

Head of School: Gary Stern 626-798-8989

website: www.highpointacademy.org

La Salle College Preparatory

3880 E. Sierra Madre Blvd. Pasadena, Ca. 

(626) 351-8951 website: www.lasallehs.org

Principal Mrs. Courtney Kassakhian

Monrovia High School

325 East Huntington Drive, Monrovia, CA 91016 

(626) 471-2800 Principal Darvin Jackson

Email: schools@monrovia.k12.ca.us

Odyssey Charter School

725 W. Altadena Dr. Altadena, Ca. 91001

(626) 229-0993 Head of School: Lauren O’Neill

website: www.odysseycharterschool.org

Pasadena High School

2925 E. Sierra Madre Blvd. Pasadena, Ca. 

(626) 396-5880 Principal: Roberto Hernandez

website: http://phs.pusd.us

St. Rita Catholic School

322 N. Baldwin Ave. Sierra Madre, Ca. 91024

Principal Joan Harabedian (626) 355-9028 

website: www.st-rita.org

Sierra Madre Elementary School

141 W. Highland Ave, Sierra Madre, Ca. 91024

(626) 355-1428 Principal: Lindsay Lewis

E-mail address: lewis.lindsay@pusd.us

Sierra Madre Middle School 

160 N. Canon Sierra Madre, Ca. 91024

(626) 836-2947 Principal: Garrett Newsom

E-mail address: newsom.garrett@pusd.us

Walden School

74 S San Gabriel Blvd

Pasadena, CA 91107 (626) 792-6166 

www.waldenschool.net

Weizmann Day School

1434 N. Altadena Dr. Pasadena, Ca. 91107

(626) 797-0204

Lisa Feldman: Head of School

Wilson Middle School

300 S. Madre St. Pasadena, Ca. 91107

(626) 449-7390 Principal: Ruth Esseln

E-mail address: resseln@pusd.us

Pasadena Unified School District

351 S. Hudson Ave., Pasadena, Ca. 91109

(626) 396-3600 Website: www.pusd@pusd.us

Arcadia Unified School District

234 Campus Dr., Arcadia, Ca. 91007

(626) 821-8300 Website: www.ausd.net

Monrovia Unified School District

325 E. Huntington Dr., Monrovia, Ca. 91016

(626) 471-2000 

Website: www.monroviaschools.net

Duarte Unified School District

1620 Huntington Dr., Duarte, Ca. 91010

(626)599-5000 

Website: www.duarte.k12.ca.us

Arcadia Christian School

1900 S. Santa Anita Avenue Arcadia, CA 91006

Preschool - and TK - 8th Grade

626-574-8229/626-574-0805

Email: inquiry@acslions.com

Principal: Cindy Harmon

website: www.acslions.com

Open House 2019We invite you totour the campus,
meet teachers,
coaches, andcurrent students.
Watch and enjoypresentations,
performances, anddemonstrationsfrom our manystudent programs!
Sunday, November 17, 201912:00 - 2:30 p.m.
3880 East Sierra Madre Blvd.
Pasadena, CA 91107Visit www.lasallehs.org 
for more information!
LEARN • SERVE • LEAD@lasallepas • www.LaSalleHS.org • 626.351.8951
Jeff’s Book Pics By Jeff Brown

HANDPRINTS ON HUBBLE: AN ASTRONAUT'S STORY OF INVENTION 
(Lemelson Center Studies in Invention and Innovation series) by Kathryn D. 
Sullivan 

The first American woman to walk in space recounts her experience as part of the 
team that launched, rescued, repaired, and maintained the Hubble Space Telescope.
The Hubble Space Telescope has revolutionized our understanding of the 
universe. It has, among many other achievements, revealed thousands of galaxies in what seemed to be empty 
patches of sky; transformed our knowledge of black holes; found dwarf planets with moons orbiting other stars; 
and measured precisely how fast the universe is expanding. In Handprints on Hubble, retired astronaut Kathryn 
Sullivan describes her work on the NASA team that made all of this possible. Sullivan, the first American woman 
to walk in space, recounts how she and other astronauts, engineers, and scientists launched, rescued, repaired, and 
maintained Hubble, the most productive observatory ever built.Along the way, Sullivan chronicles her early life 
as a “Sputnik Baby,” her path to NASA through oceanography, and her initiation into the space program as one of “thirty-five new 
guys.” (She was also one of the first six women to join NASA's storied astronaut corps.) She describes in vivid detail what liftoff feels 
like inside a spacecraft (it's like “being in an earthquake and a fighter jet at the same time”), shows us the view from a spacewalk, 
and recounts the temporary grounding of the shuttle program after the Challenger disaster.Sullivan explains that “maintainability” 
was designed into Hubble, and she describes the work of inventing the tools and processes that made on-orbit maintenance possible. 
Because in-flight repair and upgrade was part of the plan, NASA was able to fix a serious defect in Hubble's mirrors leaving literal 
and metaphorical “handprints on Hubble.”


CHRISTOPHER Nyerges


BOOK REVIEW

“Lessons from a 21st Century Samurai. SEIKEN 
WAY. Completing the Circle, A True Story” 
by Barton Boehm with Don Howell.

 

[“Seiken Way” is available as a paperback 
from Amazon.com, or as a Kindle 
download].

In the late 1970s, when I first moved into Highland Park, I 
could count on one hand the three individuals who “knew 
everything,” mentors who I could go to with questions, concerns, 
problems. Two of them have since passed away.

The third is Barton Boehm (pronounced “beam”). I met 
Boehm through my association with the non-profit WTI. 
Boehm was introduced as a friend of the non-profit’s founder, 
and as a martial arts master. 

After the Korean War, Boehm found a master living in Japan, 
and moved into the master’s home and became his full-time 
student for five years. His story is remarkable!

As I got to know Boehm better, I became his student, taking 
classes in his home dojo. There, during my private evening 
classes, I learned about holds, and getting out of holds, and 
falling, and punching, and all the ways to quickly avoid a 
fight, or to never start it in the first place.

“You don’t want to fight,” Boehm would tell me in his gregarious 
voice. “People get hurt when you fight. You want to end 
a fight as quickly as it begins. You want to dispatch your opponent 
as rapidly as possible, and get out of there.” Needless 
to say, Boehm was not a fan of the martial arts movies where 
fights go on for 30 minutes, with actors flying from rooftop to 
rooftop, breaking bricks, and continuing the battle in every 
possible position.

When we discussed the popular Kung Fu TV series with David 
Carradine, Boehm pointed out how “Caine” often had 
many opportunities to avoid a fight, and when he did fight, 
it often went on way beyond what was necessary to end it.

We had many discussions every night after our practice sessions. 
I particularly enjoyed the stories Boehm shared about 
his training with his master, Peter Kiyoshi Suzuki. I taped 
many of those conversations because they were so full of insight. 
Plus, they were highly entertaining: Some were funny, 
some deeply profound, and all had a highly pragmatic nature.

I taped all my conversations with Boehm, with the goal of 
working with him to one day produce a book of his experiences 
and insights. I knew it would be a book like no other, 
for Boehm’s five years of daily training, living with the Master, 
was unlike any I’d ever heard. But we never finished the 
book project. Then I got divorced, moved, and re-married. 
Years went by. My second wife and I sponsored stick-fighting 
classes with Boehm in our backyard where he shared the psychology 
of the Samurai, and ways to stop the fight before it 
gets started. More years went by. My second wife died, and 
that was 10 years ago, and Boehm now lived too far away for 
regular lessons.

Imagine my great happiness at receiving a package in the 
mail with Boehm’s book! He did it! The book is an incredible 
introduction to his Master’s system, Seiken. The book’s full 
title is “Lessons from a 21st Century Samurai: Seiken Way, 
Completing the Circle, A true Story.”

During my off and on training with Boehm, I got glimpses 
of how Boehm met his Master after the Korean War, Peter 
Kiyoshi Suzuki, and how Boehm then lived with the master 
for about 5 years, sleeping barely more than 4 hours a night, 
7 days a week, and losing 50 pounds after his first two years. 
It was a story of a man desiring “Power,” but, as Boehm told 
me, “I didn’t know what that meant at the time.” Boehm’s 
stories to me were filled with how Suzuki trained Boehm to 
repeat endlessly until a new technique was mastered, and to 
always “feel” what you were doing, and focus on the goal, so 
you don’t get lost in roteness. Boehm’s stories were also filled 
with fascinating stream of people that he met through his 
master, who was blind.

“The Seiken Way” fills in a lot of the gaps in Boehm’s training 
that I never heard, such as the early days of meeting Suzuki, 
and how Suzuki’s wife and two children responded to having 
a hakujin, or white man, living with them in their small 
barracks-like home in a low income part of the town. 

“The Seiken Way” points out that the full system taught by 
Suzuki is not just training the body, but also training the 
mind and the spirit. Boehm’s book explores all the major 
aspects of his training, and how a blind man developed and 
mastered several entire systems; this book focuses only on 
Seiken, meaning “kind hand,” the system taught to Boehm. 
The full name of the system is Wado Goshin SeiKen Jitsu, the 
wide, deep, kind hand system.

If you’re looking for a how-to book on martial arts systems, 
this is not that book. (In fact, no one learns martial arts from 
a book – you must learn directly with a teacher). But this 
book shows how the dedication of one man led him on the 
path of his own self-awareness, where he realized that he 
could and would even kill for his Master. Eventually, Boehm 
saw that his relationship with Suzuki was unhealthy, and he 
came back to his home in the United States. He realized that 
he’d become a Master in his own right, and his book is one 
of his ways to pass along that hard-earned knowledge that he 
gained through his unique and painful experiences. 

Boehm is now 71 and retired from an engineering career, and 
continues to teach the few students who’ve stayed with him.

His book is highly recommended to anyone seeking an insight 
into the world of Japanese martial arts. I regard the 
book as both a standard, and a classic. Interestingly, in a disclaimer 
in the beginning of the book, Boehm states that the 
writing is biographical based on real events “but is a work 
of fiction” because the actual conversations and details of 
the interactions were necessarily re-created from memory 
or imagination in order to re-tell the story. This admission 
does not diminish the quality or the significance of this work.

[Nyerges is a teacher and author, who can be reached at www.
ChristopherNyerges.com]


Mountain Views News 80 W Sierra Madre Blvd. No. 327 Sierra Madre, Ca. 91024 Office: 626.355.2737 Fax: 626.609.3285 Email: editor@mtnviewsnews.com Website: www.mtnviewsnews.com