New Chronicle feature: The Dash Between, Leticia Chavez Fischer
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Leticia Chavez Fischer showed up in her classroom each summer, several weeks before the start of the school year, with her husband, Bob, their kids, Rob and Margie, and several gallons of paint.
The former Lorain and Admiral King high school teacher, who died Oct. 24, at age 60, recruited her family to help paint walls, mend furniture and transform the room into a perfect place for instructing students to communicate in Spanish, helping them understand world cultures and having fun.
“Most teachers would bring posters,” said her sister, Myrna Chavez-Tomazic. “She brought paint.”
| The Dash Between:
About this new feature |
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The dates of birth and death that appear like bookends on a tombstone do not matter as much as the dash between those dates: The life that a person lived.  Alana Baranick The Dash Between, a new obituary feature written by Alana Baranick about regular folks from Lorain County and adjacent areas, debuts in today’s Chronicle. Baranick wrote her first obit in 1985 when she was a reporter for The Chronicle. She wrote obituaries for Cleveland’s Plain Dealer from 1992 through 2008.  "Life on the Death Beat" She is the chief author of “Life on the Death Beat: A Handbook for Obituary Writers” and director of the Society of Professional Obituary Writers. She won the 2005 American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award in the Obituary category.Today, Baranick examines the dash between Feb. 7, 1949, when Leticia Chavez Fischer was born in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico, and Oct. 24, 2009, when the retired Lorain teacher died of complications from a massive heart attack at age 60 at St. John West Shore Hospital in Westlake. The Dash Between is scheduled to appear in The Chronicle every other Sunday. To suggest a story or make a comment, contact Baranick at abaranick@chroniclet.com. Read more:
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Invariably the following year, Leticia moved to a different classroom and brought out the paint cans again.
Faculty, friends and family joked that school administrators would assign Leticia to a new classroom annually until every room in the school had a fresh coat of paint.
To get help with classroom decorating chores, Leticia applied the same technique that she used for cleaning house and teaching students.
“She made everything fun, even if it wasn’t fun,” her daughter said. “When we were little and we were bored, she’d say, ‘I know. We can play the cleaning game until you get un-bored!’ ”
Leticia also coordinated what seemed to be impromptu Jeopardy-like games in her classroom to trick her students into learning.
“You didn’t want to miss out,” said former student, Tracy Boyer Isenberg. “You just wanted to please her. You wanted to show her what you learned and to see her enthusiasm when you learned it.”
Her love of learning had its roots in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico, where her mother was a school teacher. Leticia, known fondly as Tish or Lettie, was the sixth of Ignacio and Antonia Chavez’s 10 children and the last one to be born in Mexico. Her four younger siblings were born in the United States.
Leticia’s dad, now a retired autoworker, arrived in Lorain first. According to family lore, he headed north. When he got to Lake Erie, he stopped. The truth: He was sponsored by a relative in Lorain.
As soon as he got established, he sent for the rest of the family in January 1954. All of them later became American citizens.
They immigrated to this country so all of the children would have the opportunity to get a good education and live the American dream. They worked hard for it.
“We don’t know what it’s like to go to the employment office,” said Leticia’s brother, Rudy. “We don’t know what it’s like to go on welfare. The biggest thing that we can hold onto is the education.”
Leticia, who overcame language barriers to excel academically, graduated from Admiral King in 1968, received an associate degree from Lorain County Community College in 1970 and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in education from the University of Akron.
She chose to teach in Lorain to be near family, but she also viewed it as a challenge.
“People had told me they weren’t hiring Hispanic women in Lorain Schools, and I wanted to prove them wrong,” she told a Chronicle reporter in 1977.
The Lorain Schools did hire her. She soon became head of the foreign languages department and endeared herself to students, who would later call her when they needed help with conjugating verbs for college-level Spanish classes.
“She was fun,” Tracy Isenberg said. “We were learning through the fun. I can’t picture her face without a smile. Even when she tried to get stern with us, you knew she was ready to smile. A contagious smile. Sort of a mischievous smile. Her eyes would twinkle like she was up to something.”
Occasionally, another look crossed Leticia’s face.
“If you got on her wrong side, she had this eyebrow thing,” her daughter said. “One eyebrow went up. The other went down. ‘Don’t mess with me.’ You knew you had to straighten up or else.”
Leticia also got serious when representing fellow teachers in collective bargaining negotiations. She served as a delegate at several National Education Association conventions.
She met fellow educator Bob Fischer during the Lorain teacher’s strike of 1979, when they both frequented the rented storefront that served as union headquarters. The bachelor and the bachelorette, both in their early 30s, were married Aug. 9, 1980.
Twice a week, the newlyweds drove to the University of Akron so Leticia could complete work on the master’s degree in education that she finally received in June 1982.
In addition to teaching, Leticia did make-up for stage plays at Admiral King. She and Bob also measured marching band members for uniforms every year.
After retiring from full-time teaching a couple of years ago, Leticia continued educating children as a part-time tutor and proficiency evaluator at Lorain’s Irving Elementary School.
Leticia, formerly of Sheffield Village, was on the job a few days before suffering a massive heart attack (which led to her death) while having breakfast at home in North Ridgeville.
“I was with her that morning,” her daughter said. “We were going to have cleaning day.”
Contact Alana Baranick at (216) 862-2617 or abaranick@chroniclet.com.
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