A memorial service for former Accolade adviser and English teacher Carol Wagner Hallenbeck will be held on Saturday, March 8, at the Aldersgate United Methodist Church in Tustin, Hallenbeck’s surviving family members said.
Hallenbeck, who worked at Sunny Hills from the 1969-1970 school year until the 1992-1993 school year, died of old age in her sleep on Sunday, Feb. 2, in her Costa Mesa retirement community apartment. She was 97.
Mark Hallenbeck, the youngest of her three sons, reflected on the bond he shared with his mother and the qualities that made her special.
“She was my mom and everything a mom is meant to be — love, support and an intellectual/moral example,” he said. “What I’ll miss most about her is her smile; whether I was coming home from college in the 1970s or visiting her in her later years, that smile on her face when she saw me was wonderful.”
Hallenbeck’s middle child, Todd Hallenbeck, said she was in decent physical shape until the last month of her life. She used her walker inside her apartment and let the caregivers take her to meals in her wheelchair. He said he found out about his mother’s death from the hospice taking care of her. Her husband, Bruce, died seven years ago from natural causes.
Despite her limitations, the former educator carried her love of reading to the end in her apartment.
“She definitely still had the journalism blood in her,” Todd said. “She read the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Register and Wall Street Journal every day.”
Even in her final days, Carol Hallenbeck remained deeply connected to the things she loved most.
“[My mother] would quite often [talk about her time at Sunny Hills and the students she’d met as] that was one of the highlights of her life,” the second son said. “She was still in touch with more than a handful of her students.”
Although her sons had hoped she would live to 100, by the end, Carol Hallenbeck felt at peace with her life.
“She was just ‘ready,’” Todd Hallenbeck said. “I think she’d accomplished everything that she wanted to accomplish.”
The youngest Hallenbeck brother said he and the surviving family members hope for a large turnout at the 1-4 p.m. memorial as he and his two older brothers believe their mother would have wanted as many people as possible to celebrate her life.
“It is very inclusive; you do not have to belong to any church,” he said. “You can be anybody; she cared about the person, and that’s all that mattered to her.”
Todd Hallenbeck said the minister will share a few words and then James Hallenbeck, the eldest son, will read her life story following that. Each child will then share his favorite memories and reflections on her impact on the people and community around her. Others attending the service will also have the opportunity to go to the podium and speak about what she meant to them. The service will also include traditional Christian hymns.
No casket will be available for viewing as family members said their mother chose to be cremated.
A LEGEND IN ACCO LORE
Current journalism teacher and Accolade adviser Tommy Li said he first learned of Carol Hallenbeck’s death after reading a Saturday, Feb. 15, email from an Accolade alumna.
“I’m sure you saw that Mrs. Hallenbeck died on Feb. 2 — at the age of 97! Here’s her obituary in the Orange County Register. … She was a great teacher who touched many lives,” wrote Class of 1974’s Martha Gershun, co-editor of The Accolade during the 1972-1973 school year and co-editor of the Excalibur magazine during the 1973-1974 school year.
Gershun said she was traveling overseas when her Accolade co-editor sent her the link of the death notice posted on the Register’s website nearly two weeks later on Feb. 15. Though she won’t return in time for the memorial service, she informed Li that she would send her condolences to the Hallenbeck family.
The current adviser said he met Carol Hallenbeck within his first few years of teaching here in the 2001-2002 school year; Li’s predecessor, Kimberley Harris — now the journalism adviser at Fullerton Union High School — was the one who was hired to replace Carol Hallenbeck during the 1993-1994 school year.
“Carol was feisty, smart and funny,” Harris said. “I will be forever grateful that she built a powerhouse journalism program that I was able to be a part of.”
Li, who oversaw the journalism program during two separate tenures, is in his 16th year advising The Accolade and behind only Carol Hallenbeck’s 24-year record of guiding the publication.
“I remember she was a diminutive lady who showed up during local journalism conventions and writing contests,” he said. “She was very soft-spoken but always confident about anything related to scholastic journalism.
“I also remember hearing from her how she recruited students to join her journalism program by promising them she could help them get admitted to Ivy League schools. And she did. That’s how much of a legendary adviser Carol Hallenbeck was.”
Li, who plans to attend the memorial service, posted the print version of the ex-adviser’s obituary on The Accolade’s Facebook page, prompting more of Carol Hallenbeck’s former students to respond with a comment.
“She was an amazingly gifted teacher,” wrote Renee Marlin-Bennett. “I will never forget lessons learned in journalism and Great Books. I will keep asking the next question.”
Class of 1979’s Steve Lipman also posted a message about his former adviser; to memorialize her, he brought an issue of The Accolade and Excalibur to the nation’s capital and had someone to take a picture of him holding both of those print products with the Capitol building in the background.
“She was a favorite HS [high school] teacher of mine at Sunny Hills High in Fullerton, where I spent four years on the Accolade newspaper and Excalibur magazine staffs,” Lipman wrote. “I was indirectly in touch with her and her family through her family just before our 40th HS [high school] reunion. … When the DJ didn’t show up for our 40th Reunion in 2019, rather than dancing to bad disco, we sat around the table and reminisced over The Accolade stories. Who needed a DJ?”
“She truly inspired me in my young adulthood. May her memory be for a blessing.”
Those comments prompted six more on The Accolade Facebook page. Among those were the following:
“I came to Sunny Hills in the middle of my junior year and really admired her,” wrote Shannon Shaffer Peterson.” Glad she had a long and interesting life.”
From Stuart Packard: “Had the pleasure of working on Excalibur and being in her class. That may have been the impetus for me to get my BA [bachelor of arts] in journalism and public relations.”
Gershun said her former journalism adviser treated all her students as professionals.
“She expected us to deliver top-notch copy based on solid reporting and perform all of our editing, layout and distribution tasks with the same focus and skill,” she said. “She believed that student journalism was real journalism [and] because she believed our work mattered, we believed it mattered.”
JOURNEY TOWARD BECOMING AN EDUCATOR
Todd Hallenbeck gave the following biographical account of his mother:
Born in Clinton, Iowa, on Feb. 23, 1927, Carol Wagner — her maiden name — graduated summa cum laude from Northwestern University in 1949 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism.
Before moving to the West Coast to get hired as an English and journalism teacher here, she spent around 20 years living in Chicago, Kansas, North Carolina, Philadelphia and Seattle holding down various jobs ranging from a contributor to her hometown paper, the Clinton Herald to advertisement writer for a department store in Chicago known as Marshall Field and Co.
The youngest of one sibling, she then met Bruce Hallenbeck and eventually married him in June 1950 and took his last name as her own.
A few years after settling into married life, the couple gave birth to their eldest son in 1953, their middle child in 1955 and their youngest in 1957.
As her husband was constantly getting promoted to work at other places for his job as a salesman, they moved to Pennsylvania around 1959.
The Hallenbecks later moved to Southern California because of Carol Hallenbeck’s husband’s job opportunities and lived in Orange County. She then decided to get her teaching credential at California State University, Fullerton, as it was the closest college campus to their residence at the time.
She did her student teaching at Sunny Hills, though the exact reason she was assigned there remains unclear, even to her family. However, the school saw potential in her and offered her a job, leading her to stay and begin her long career there.
REACTION FROM SH FACULTY
Few instructors remain at Sunny Hills who were working here during Carol Hallenbeck’s tenure.
English teacher Randy Oudega said the former journalism adviser was also the English Department chairwoman in his first year here in 1988.
“Carol Hallenbeck was the department chair[woman] who hired me as an English teacher at Sunny Hills,” Oudega said. “I was only 23 years old, fresh out of college and totally inexperienced, but she gave me a chance at Sunny Hills and even trusted me to teach honors classes in my very first year of teaching.
“She was a compassionate mentor for me personally, and she set high standards for Sunny Hills English teachers in general.”
Another thing that the sophomore honors English teacher said he remembered about her was her work ethic.
“She was famous for assigning so many essays that she had to correct them during the summer and mail them back to the kids using envelopes and stamps,” said Oudega, who has also taught Advanced Placement [AP] Language and Composition as well as AP Literature.
Finally, Carol Hallenbeck showed innovative thinking.
“She introduced the idea of using computers in education at Sunny Hills by setting up a lab of Macintosh computers and forcing English teachers to bring kids in there and use them,” Oudega said.
Tom Wiegman, who retired as an English teacher last year, also recalled that computer lab.
“When I first came to Sunny Hills in 1989, Carol was my neighbor with a computer lab between us. She was one of the only ones interested in using computers with students, which was unusual for a teacher in the latter stage of her career,” said Wiegman, who has returned to Sunny Hills last month to be English teacher Teresa McCarty’s long-term substitute instructor. “She got her Accolade staff to use them. She was a dynamo even though all she had were floppy disk drives and eventually ‘big’ 20 megabyte (not gigabyte) hard drives.
“She made The Accolade into one of the best school newspapers in the country. I became the coordinator for the “Mac Lab” and worked with her until she retired.”
Harris said she was a Redondo Union High School student in Los Angeles County when she first met Carol Hallenbeck 40 years ago at a journalism writing competition in 1985 at El Camino College in Torrance. That was also where Sunny Hills journalism students competed in the same contest.
So upon Carol Hallenbeck’s retirement at the end of the 1992-1993 school year, Harris ironically ended up becoming the legendary adviser’s successor.
“She wasn’t too sure about me — barely age 24 — taking over for her as the Sunny Hills adviser, but I worked hard to continue the award-winning program, publishing a newspaper every two weeks for several years,” the Fullerton Union High School teacher said. “Carol Hallenbeck stayed away from the Sunny Hills newsroom after she retired, but her high standards pushed me to be a better teacher. I didn’t want to let her down.”
Besides the veteran adviser’s service on the board of the Southern California Journalism Education Association, Carol Hallenbeck and two others in 2001 produced a book titled, Practical Ideas for Teaching Journalism, Harris said.
“To celebrate the book, we planned break-out sessions for the October 2001 JEA [Journalism Education Association] convention that we were hosting in SoCal. But then 9/11 happened,” she said. “We canceled the convention, and the book promotion didn’t seem as important.”
LIFE AFTER SUNNY HILLS
Two years after retiring as an educator, Carol Hallenbeck decided to volunteer as a docent at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, her sons said. She ended her service in 2015 at 88 years old.
Mary Green, who worked alongside Carol Hallenbeck as a docent, said her passion for education and dedication to the museum community left a lasting impact.
“Carol was an exemplary docent and encouraged many others to be actively involved in the Docent Guild,” Green said. “She had such a rich appetite for learning, which was evident in her informative tours, and gifted guidance in training incoming docents.”
In her time working at the museum, Carol Hallenbeck was the recipient of the Life Appreciation Award, Ann Spencer Award and the Kennedy Docent of the Year Award.
From 2015 on, though, she used the rest of her life to travel and rest.
“Many of us in the journalism advising profession lost track of her,” Li said. “Some Acco alum would ask me about her, wanting to catch up with her, but I could not help because no one I know was aware of her whereabouts.”
Nevertheless, no matter who Carol Hallenbeck interacted with, her influence will remain even though she’s no longer living.
“She pushed us to go to the source for a story, overcoming our fears of questioning an administrator, a police detective or the intimidating football coach,” said Class of 1974’s Kim Fix, who had worked with Gershun as co-editors. “I even recall being sent multiple times to collect advertising money from the smarmy tuxedo rental guy that was always slow to pay.”
The former journalism adviser and docent is survived by her three sons and their wives, four grandchildren and six great grandchildren.
Mark Hallenbeck said his mother encouraged those around her to put their all into everything they did.
“She didn’t stick her nose [into what] you were doing, but if you wanted to be the best in the world, she would make sure you had the opportunity to do it, but it was you who had to drive yourself,” he said. “She was someone who facilitated your passions, and that’s what was cool about journalism.
“She found students who were driven to be good journalists, and that was like heaven for her because she was facilitating people growing into the profession that she loved.”
