Daily Mining Gazette Bill Polkinghorne in his office at Houghton-Portage Township School District in 2011

HOUGHTON — Former students and administrators are mourning a longtime Copper Country educator.

Bill Polkinghorne died Wednesday at the age of 78. Polkinghorne had a 40-year career at Houghton-Portage Township Schools, starting as a sixth-grade teacher and eventually becoming elementary school principal and eventually superintendent. He retired from that position in 2011.

“He was a fine superintendent, and I truly enjoyed working with him,” said Nels Christopherson, treasurer for the district board and a member who helped select Polkinghorne as superintendent. “He helped the school district in numerous ways.”

A Hancock High School graduate, Polkinghorne went on to Northern Michigan University, obtaining bachelor’s, masters and specialist degrees in education. He also contributed to the community in other ways, volunteering at Evangel Community Church and running Michigan Technological University’s Summer Youth Program for more than 10 years.

Even after his retirement, Polkinghorne stayed connected to the district. When Anders Hill became principal at the elementary school, Polkinghorne would reach out periodically to tell him he was doing a great job.

“You hear a lot of negative things, and you certainly hear from people when they’re upset,” Hill said. “To hear from someone who had done the job so well, and to get positive feedback, was such a good thing.”

That was the way he treated everybody, Hill said. Hill had known Polkinghorne since he was a child, when he downhill skied with Polkinghorne’s son.

“He didn’t treat people differently,” he said. “He was good to everybody. That’s not a common trait, and certainly something we all try to emulate and carry forward at Houghton.”

Hill said the district remains in a good place because of Polkinghorne’s high standards and the relationships he built.

“He led through a time when school budgets were being cut, and the state was not necessarily funding schools in a great way,” he said.

The other part of his legacy, Hill said, was the positive relationships he had with everybody.

“He just knew that joke, or how to get somebody to smile,” he said.

Frank Agin, president of the Houghton High School Alumni Association, had Polkinghorne as a sixth-grade teacher in 1974.

He credits Polkinghorne with changing the course of his life. At the end of the year, Polkinghorne gave a speech to the class pumping them up for seventh grade, pointing to them one by one and saying “You’ll be on the honor roll.”

He skipped Agin.

At that moment, Agin said, he realized he “didn’t want to be a knucklehead.”

“That made me so mad, that next year I was committed to being on the honor roll,” he said. “I wasn’t valedictorian, but I never missed the honor roll after that.”

Years later, he met Polkinghorne and reminded him of the incident, and told him how it had provoked him.

Polkinghorne’s response: “I intended that.”

When Polkinghorne was superintendent, he reached out to Agin and a few other students to help resuscitate the flagging high school alumni group. Since then, Polkinghorne had been vital in helping to connect alumni, Agin said.

“It was certainly something he didn’t have to do … it’s not essential to the operation of a high school,” Agin said. “But he just felt it was important to keep the connection between the alumni and the school.”

Agin had planned to get in touch with Polkinghorne this summer when he came up for the alumni reunion. When he heard about Polkinghorne’s death this week, he said, he “about fell out of my chair.”

“We’re all saddened, we’re all shocked by this,” he said. “We’ll miss him.”