Bill Dunkum was a premier High School physics teacher at TC Williams.
Fred wrote: “Bill Dunkum was Dr. Dunkum, Kurt’s and mine Physics teacher in 11th grade, 1972 to 1973. My God, there is a whole years worth of stories behind that year! Yes, he was a mentor of Kurts’, a great teacher and human. He had hemophilia and died too early but Kurt stayed in touch with him.”
There is a occult story here…At the party in October 1986, the day that Kurt announced to our group that he had asked me to marry him and I had accepted, he called Bill Dunkum later that day. His wife Shakti answered the phone and told Kurt that they were having Bill’s wake right that very moment. He had died. I told Kurt that Bill had entered his mind with the with to contact him in order that Kurt would know that he had passed over…
Social Security says: WILLIAM DUNKUM, who was born 21 March 1942 and, Death Master File says, died October 1986.
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- Bill Dunkum Wedding Announcement
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- Picture from post card
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- Kurt went to wedding
Dr. William Dunkum, what a great person! Kurt and I met him in the fall of 1972 at T. C. Williams High School. It was the second of 2 classes Kurt and I shared that year. Dr, Dunkum started the school year late due to medical problems and the school really didn’t have a full time replacement for him until he returned. Our class was right after lunch, so from the start of the school year until his return, Kurt and I found all sorts of ways to get into trouble. We took the 45 minutes from lunch and added the 45 minutes of the Physics class that really didn’t have a teacher and voila!, we now had an hour and a half of play time! Two teenagers, double the trouble! We had cars and we started cruising around. Then, we went to Tyson’s Corners Mall, which back in 1972 was the only thing there, not the City it is today. We found this food store that sold canned exotic animal meats, yuck, but their bakery was fantastic! I still remember the fresh loaves of bread coming out that we would devour before wandering around the Mall before heading back to school for our next real class. Towards the fall of ’72, Dr. Dunkum returned and things got interesting! His first comments were, ” I only give the grades of A, B, C and F. You either pass or fail, no in-between! “. Luckily, the first part of the year, we did paired testing, so I always gat an A, thanks to Kurt! Then, we decided we liked goofing off more so we started skipping more and more of Dr. Dunkum’s classes. Then the end of the school year came in June, 1973 and final grading. For Kurt, this wasn’t a problem as the Dr. knew Kurt was already above the level being taught and he would pass easily. For me, problem! At grading time, Dr. Dunkum kept Kurt and I back while he passed out everyone else’s grades and they left. Finally, he gets us. Kurt, of course, got an A. For me, Dr. Dunkum got this strange look on his face and told me he was going to have to break his Iron rule of no D’s for a grade! His explanation was even with Kurt’s help, I had missed too many classes to pass with a C. Then he said, ” if I had absorbed 1/10th of what Mr. Christensen talks about all of the time, I had learned more than he, the Dr., could ever have taught me so he honestly couldn’t fail me and I got his first ever D!”. That was Kurt! And Dr. Dunkum was right, I never stopped learning from Kurt!
My understanding is that that great man died of AIDS from a transfusion due to his hemophilia before they knew enough on how to screen the blood supply for it, a great loss to us students and science in general.
Kurt, we miss you more every day.