Going to college wasn’t on Rita Maas Nutt’s radar screen when she was attending Harding High School in St. Paul in the late 1970s.
Her parents hadn’t gone to college; neither had her older siblings.
“Nobody in my family ever had,” she said. “We didn’t have the money for it.”
But theater teacher Dale Fretland “marched (her) down to the counselor’s office one day and said, ‘Find her the money. She’s going to college,’ ” said Nutt, who went on to earn a doctorate in nursing and teaches at Salisbury University in Salisbury, Md.
“I just kept going,” she said. “Without that push, I don’t know if I would have done that. He became a mentor to everybody. He was amazing. I don’t know if he realizes how much he changed people’s lives.”
Nutt, 57, of Magnolia, Del., got a chance to tell Fretland in person Saturday afternoon at a reunion of about 35 of his former students at Richard Walton Park in Oakdale. The event, organized by Marcie Hofford Svitoris and Mari Tubbesing, was the 10th annual gathering of a Facebook group started by Svitoris called “Mr. Dale Fretland aka Fret — The BEST theatre teacher of all time!”
Fretland, who taught at Washington High School from 1966 to 1971 and at Harding from 1971 to 2003, set high expectations for his students and wasn’t afraid to tackle “huge and difficult” plays, said David Carlson, 66, a retired actor, designer and musician.
He also wasn’t afraid to take chances, Carlson said. For example, the 1970 production of “The House of Bernarda Alba” by Federico García Lorca at Washington featured an all-female cast. “He was ahead of his time,” Carlson said.
In 1971, Fretland’s students performed “Medea” by Euripides. “It’s seldom done by colleges, let alone high schools,” Carlson said.
“I wanted to push them,” Fretland explained. “I wanted to challenge them. I wanted to expose them to quality dramatic literature, and I wanted to expose them to characters who were complex.”
Fretland also taught his students to enunciate and project — lessons that served Carlson well, he said.
“He’d yell, ‘Mushmouth! Use diction! Louder!’ ” said Carlson, who lives in Blaine. “That was a big thing because we had to fill the auditorium. To this day, I have a big diaphragm, and I’m a loud guy. My wife always says, ‘Sshhhh. Be quiet.’ We had to fill the auditorium — and those were big school auditoriums — without the help of the little ear microphones that they have now. The acoustics were not great, but we could be heard.”
Fretland, 76, of Lakeland, attended Fergus Falls Community College, intending to become a dentist. He was editor of the student newspaper, and the newspaper adviser called him into his office one day, and said he should pursue his love of writing and the theater.
“He said, ‘Fretland, when are you going to figure out who the hell you are?’ ” Fretland said. “He said I might be a very good dentist, but how much fun am I going to have?”
Fretland graduated from Minnesota State University, Mankato, where he discovered his passion for teaching, he said. “I learned that I had to relate to my students as real people who have tangled and needy lives,” he said. “They were just kids that I had an interest in.”
Fretland’s interest in his students at Harding was life-changing, said Conrad Lee, 54, of Cottage Grove.
“He was more than a teacher,” Lee said. “He loved what he did, and knew we all loved him back. His corner room at the end of the hall was a safe haven. If you were bullied … or were having a bad day at home, this was a place you could go and express yourself and be yourself and be accepted amongst your peers. That was your family in school.”
Fretland, who is married and has two children, “would stay after hours and work on weekend,” he said. “Sometimes when we practiced, we’d be there until 10, 11, midnight to get the show done.”
“One of the most valuable lessons he taught me — one that got me through tough times later in life — was that I was good enough as me,” said Mark Severson, 57, of St. Paul. “I never had to act like I was someone else. He definitely reinforced to me that I had to treat people as I wanted to be treated: The golden-rule thing. I’d like to think reunions like this happen for other teachers, but he is a special guy.”
When Jim McKelvey’s father died, Fretland came to see him. When McKelvey underwent a major operation a few years later, Fretland came to visit him at the hospital.
“He never forgot anybody. He was always there,” said McKelvey, 67, of St. Paul, and a 1970 graduate of Washington. “To me, he was like a big brother. He got me to go to college up in Fergus Falls. If you needed him, all you had to do was give him a call. He showed up. He always showed up.”
Anita Hansen Fisher traveled from her home in Spring Hill, Fla., to attend the reunion. The 1975 graduate of Harding High SchooI said Fretland showed his students “how to be the best at what we did.”
“I didn’t have a lot of self-esteem in high school, and he helped me through it,” she said. “He cared about each one of us. A lot of kids get out of high school, and they don’t even think about their teachers or even remember their names, but Mr. Fretland is like family, and you just love him to death and you never forget him, and that’s the way it is. You’re always thinking about him because he left such an indelible mark on your life and in your memory. We were so lucky to have him as a teacher.”
