Teacher Grew Up In Wallingford -- Neighbors Recall Polite Boy, Part Of A Gracious Family

The tidy Wallingford neighborhood where Neal Summers spent his childhood stands in great contrast to the violence that ended his life and the allegations of sexual misconduct that followed his death.

Parts of the block show signs of wear; renters have taken up residence in houses where the old folks have died or moved away, and some walls and windows aren't scrubbed the way they used to be.

But many oldtimers remain, holding fast to a piece of old Seattle, cherishing as much the hominess as they do the view of Lake Union and downtown.

These longtime residents say the Summers family was a decent lot, especially Neal, the youngest of four boys, the one who sent every neighbor an invitation to celebrate his dad's 70th birthday.

Dad, Lyle K. Summers, was a workaday lawyer, so steadfast you could set your watch by his comings and goings in the years when he was well enough to commute to his downtown office in the Jones Building. Now retired, he uses a wheelchair, suffering greatly not just from a debilitating injury but from the news that floods the airwaves today about his youngest son.

As the story emerges that an angry young man killed Neal Summers because Summers allegedly sexually abused him, a slow trickle of family and friends mounts the brick-lined porch on Densmore Avenue North to console the father. One visitor is Elbert Garrett, 78, moving slowly with his 12-year-old dog by his side. The retired school janitor is grief-stricken, not just for the older man, the "attorney who was always so friendly to me, always so congenial," but also for the younger man he remembers as an equally gracious neighbor.

Widowed, father of four remarried

In happier days, just after World War II, the children were arriving one after the other in Lyle and Beulah Summers' home, a white two-story house with clapboard sides and neat hedges. She died, though, when Neal was just a child. The father was soon remarried, to Jean, a conservatory-trained pianist who taught school and who, by all accounts, was a good stepmom. She died a few years ago.

The elder Summers was quite a fixture in the neighborhood, said Karen Duval, who lives across the street with her husband, a police officer. "My kids used to go visit and bum candy bars off of him," she said.

More recently, as Edith Ford began having a little trouble mounting the steep stairs to her home across the street, she'd notice how Summers would be "sitting in his wheelchair, watching to make sure I would get up the stairs."

For his part, Neal Summers fit the mold, say neighbors like Ford. "He was always the one to help when his dad needed help."

Following in the path of their stepmother, three of the boys, including Neal, became teachers. Neal was a loner at Lincoln High School, and he lived at home while he majored in education at the University of Washington in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

When he became a teaching intern, Summers didn't go far from home. He taught at Hamilton Middle School, a brick edifice that dominates the street a half-block from his family home.

Neal Summers' first home away from home was a low-lying fourplex at the base of Seattle's Hawthorne Hills. Jean Rudasill, who has lived at the Hawthorne Court Apartments for 25 years, remembers him well.

She reached behind the door and produced a piece of driftwood that Summers had brought her from the Pacific Ocean sometime during the mid-1970s. "I was thrilled to get it," she said. "I don't get to the ocean much."

"He was a nice fellow," she said.

Summers was teaching at Whitman Middle School, beginning to make a reputation for himself as a vigorous friend of students and faculty, when he moved to a house north of Seattle on 32nd Avenue Northeast about 15 years ago.

The North End neighborhood, a postwar creation of single-story ramblers, was a lot newer than the one he grew up in. Summers' house is less well-kept than some of the others, but neighbors like Teresa Yarnish say he was always a good neighbor. A basketball hoop dominates the driveway, and it was there that he would entertain the young men in the neighborhood. Kids would arrive by the carload, and often would troop off with him to camping and canoeing outings.

Lopez Island neighbors admired Summers

In summer, outings took Summers and, regularly, his students to Lopez Island.

Summers spent many weekends and summer weeks in a secluded part of the island, a peninsula about 10 miles from the ferry landing.

Most of the houses along the narrow strip of dead-end pavement called Peninsula Road are obscured from street view. Summers' A frame cabin stands near the road in a broad clearing. It faces a stand of trees across the road and, beyond that, the beach along San Juan Channel, where he and his neighbors would gather many times to watch the sunsets, and where he and groups of teen-age boys would push off from shore for canoe trips.

The house shows pride. The A-frame and three outbuildings have new gray paint. Summers had installed a well, a septic field, a new deck, a new metal roof. The lawn is groomed. A rhododendron is staked near the wall. Neat piles of lumber, tools and paint were left on the porches from his latest trip. He obviously had planned to come back soon.

Mark and Dorothy Gregoire are the neighbors who know Summers best.

"One thing he did up here which we really admired him for was he'd have these kids from his school over on a canoeing-camping trip every year," Mark Gregoire said yesterday. "He did a tremendous job preparing them for it. They'd have to be very self-reliant cooking and canoeing and camping."

"It was kind of a reward for these kids," Dorothy Gregoire said. "They had to earn it."

The kids were always boys, but that seemed proper. They ranged from early teens to later teens.

The Gregoires were shocked by the killing and can't believe allegations of molestation.

"If that's him, he's a Jekyll and Hyde," Mark Gregoire said. "It's just not believable. Whatever is there, you know, peoples' private lives can fool you, and people should have private lives, but that's not him."