Bruce Hamren Recounts His Life and Times at Athenian

Bruce Hamren has been at Athenian for thirty-three years, but he has a good memory, leaving him with plenty of stories to tell. He still recalls his very first interaction with Athenian in the early nineties.

“The first time I called up Athenian—well, you should know, in this book there would be these schools that might be religious—I don’t want to offend anybody but I’ll tell you this. It would be like Jesus is Lord school, population five. And then I came across Athenian, population 120 or something like that. And then I asked my wife and she said: ‘That’s Blackhawk, it’s kind of a nice area over there.’ So I called them up and said ‘So, is this a real school?’ And the woman says, ‘Well, we like to think so,’” Bruce said.

However, it was the middle of the school year, and Athenian told Bruce that for Biology and Marine Sciences, the subjects he was most qualified to teach, they already had a teacher. Bruce went back to searching.

During that process, Shell spilled oil in the Carquinez Strait, which is around half an hour from Athenian. Bruce decided to attend a town hall meeting in the county to determine what should be done about the spill. He proposed that they spend the money on kits for students around the bay to test water quality—they would be able to pinpoint spills while becoming more informed about the place they lived in.

“I thought it was a great idea. I went to the town meeting and stood up and said my piece. They said ‘Thank you very much’ and they never got back to me,” Bruce said. “But I was walking out of the meeting and a woman came up behind me and said ‘Excuse me, I heard what you said and I wanted to tell you there’s a school that thinks just like you do.’ She was an attorney for something like the WWF. I go ‘Oh, I already talked to them. They don’t need someone.’ She says, ‘I think you should go again.’ I’m superstitious, and so I go, ‘Well, OK I’ll go again.’ She tells me her name; her name was Trish Sprague. I called Athenian up and said,  ‘Do you need somebody?’ They said, ‘No, still don’t need somebody, but you can come by and drop by your resume.’ So I came and dropped off my resume, saw a little bit of the campus and I went home. The next day, I was at my home having lunch when the phone rang, and it says ‘Hi, this is Athenian! We just lost our Biology teacher, would you like to come in and interview?’”

Upon joining the teaching staff, Bruce thrived in Athenian’s atmosphere. One of his favorite memories comes from those earlier days when he and other members of the staff annually made and detonated bombs on campus. One graduation, they decided to make an extra-big bomb.

“We took a big balloon full of propane gas and another that was explosive gas, and the idea was that we wanted to have a big ball of fire and an explosion come out from the middle of it and watch it open the flame. Well, to make that happen, we had to set up this frame, so a lot of calculations, and supporting the balloons, so we had hydrogen balloons, helium balloons floating this thing up in the air, tethered to the ground. Some student had done a bioswale in front of the main hall so we couldn’t do it there, because there’s too much grass, it might catch fire. So we put it on the hill,” Bruce said.

Putting the bomb on a hill had some unforeseen side effects. The shockwave would usually echo around campus, but it didn’t this time, so the explosion seemed less impressive than normal. However, the shockwave didn’t disappear—Athenian's unsuspecting neighbors heard it instead.

Bruce said, “I was interviewing a student to be a TA afterwards when somebody comes in and goes ‘Bruce, there’s a policeman here who’s looking for you.’ I go, ‘Oh sure, tell him I’ll be there in a minute.’ Policeman comes walking in and I thought it was a joke. He asks what happened and we show him. And Dave and I show him the slow motion of what happened. He says, ‘I’ll make it all right back at the main office. But next time call us, because somebody in Diablo was with a tractor working around a gas line, and when that explosion went off, we didn’t know what it was, we just knew it was bad, and we launched 11 emergency vehicles.’”

The bomb is just one, albeit extreme, example of why Bruce has stayed at Athenian for all these years.Through the annual bombings, Bruce was able to collaborate with students on projects they were passionate about, which he says is part of the Athenian way of “teaching through relationships.”

Bruce said, “One of my strengths growing up was making really good friends, and I spent all of my time outdoors. It’s no wonder. I lived on the edge of a canyon with rivers and caves and hunting and fishing, and I slept outside all the time. It was a combination of ideals—I grew up in a religious environment, where there’s a way to be, a way to treat people. So it was a combination of my connections with people, with nature, with whatever is running this universe, and with nature came the sciences.”

Twelfth-grader Liza Corr had Bruce for ninth-grade physics and this year for the seminar Humanitas. She shared an anecdote that illustrates Bruce’s “teaching through relationships.”

“One of the first things he said to me when we were in-person in class, because we were hybrid, was when I asked him a question, he turned to me and went, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. You must have mistaken me for someone who cares.’ But he’s really sweet. And then on AWE, he sent me a little picture of a guy drinking from a water fountain in the desert and it said “Deep Down I Do Care” and that was cute,” Liza said.