Alexander Cameron, Educator For 35 Years In Seattle Schools

Alexander D. Cameron was a promising young football player on the Minnesota Iron Range in the 1920s. The dean at Hibbing Junior College suggested he might want to head out West, to play for the team at the University of Washington.

So Mr. Cameron and two friends piled into a Model T in 1928, embarking on an adventure that consumed eight days, 109 gallons of gasoline and 22 quarts of oil.

Once Mr. Cameron arrived in Washington, he stayed, spending 35 years as a teacher, counselor, vice principal and principal in the Seattle schools.

Mr. Cameron died Sunday (Dec. 12). He was 87.

His memorial service yesterday featured a bagpipe, champagne and readings from Mr. Cameron's memoirs. "He wanted a blowout," said his daughter, Anne Schoedel.

Mr. Cameron was born in Scotland, but emigrated with his family when he was 1 1/2. They were bound for British Columbia but never got past the Iron Range in northern Minnesota.

Mr. Cameron's father was a railroad worker, and the family lived in isolated places. Schoedel said her father remembered being chased by wolves as he pumped a railroad handcart down the tracks. He excelled in football, hockey and track.

While football brought Mr. Cameron to Seattle, he played for the Huskies only briefly. He graduated from the University of Washington in 1931, taking his first teaching job at the state School for the Blind in Vancouver.

He and another teacher, Hazel Mort, married the following year.

Mr. Cameron returned to Seattle for graduate work and began teaching in the Seattle in 1936 at B.F. Day, then a pre-vocational school. He received his master's degree from the University of Washington in 1938.

Mr. Cameron taught science at John Marshall Junior High for 14 years and served as a counselor at Hamilton Junior High for three more before entering administration as vice principal at James Monroe Junior High in 1955.

In his memoirs, Mr. Cameron wrote of paddling the posteriors of several particularly troublesome boys at Monroe with a tennis shoe to keep them in line. When he left the school, the faculty presented him with a tennis shoe mounted in a shadow box "for services rendered."

Mr. Cameron became principal at Blaine Junior High in 1959, moving to a similar position at Denny Junior High in 1961. He spent the final nine years of his career as principal at Eckstein, then the largest junior high school in the state, before retiring in 1971.

Aurlo Bonney, a fellow junior-high principal, said Mr. Cameron "came through as a quiet person, and yet he was pretty slick with a joke. He wore well."

Mr. Cameron believed in "keeping the whole operation under control, so students could learn and teachers could teach," Bonney said.

After his first wife died, Mr. Cameron married Lucile "Bonnie" Dewey in 1971. They traveled extensively after he retired, visiting England and Scotland, where Mr. Cameron had many relatives.

He also enjoyed golf, fishing and bowling.

Survivors include his widow, of Seattle; a brother, David Cameron of Gibsonia, Pa.; a son, Alexander "Sandy" Cameron, Jr., of Federal Way; a daughter, Anne Schoedel of Valleyford, Spokane County; and four grandchildren.

The family suggests remembrances to the Children's Hospital Foundation or the Kenney Home.