{"id":855,"date":"2018-12-13T17:03:47","date_gmt":"2018-12-14T00:03:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hillbrook.us\/voices\/?p=855"},"modified":"2018-12-17T11:06:09","modified_gmt":"2018-12-17T18:06:09","slug":"a-spotlight-on-richerd-cancilla-our-first-student","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.hillbrook.us\/voices\/2018\/12\/a-spotlight-on-richerd-cancilla-our-first-student\/","title":{"rendered":"A Spotlight on Richerd Cancilla, Our First Student"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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It\u2019s Tuesday night at Sharks Ice in San Jose. Crowds of people are circling the rink, some whiz by effortlessly, while others cling to the sides. In the middle of the action, an 88-year-old retired electrical engineer glides gracefully by and then lifts himself off the ice into a single axel loop combination. He lands, grins, and keeps going, pausing occasionally to say hello to friends or to applaud another skater. This skating aficionado and rink regular is Richerd Cancilla, the very first student of The Children\u2019s Country School, which later became Hillbrook School. The fact that Richerd is still skating like a young man at 88 years old is only one of the remarkable things about him. His life is full of extraordinary accomplishments and is a testament to the power of a well-rounded education to nurture and inspire the best in us.
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Cancilla was three years old and a ward of the State of California when he first came to The Children\u2019s Country School. The school was the dream of two educators, Mary Orem, and Elizabeth Glassford, and it was in its infancy when Cancilla came to them, little more than a baby himself. The year was 1935 and America was still in the grips of the Great Depression. His parents were unable to care for him, so he became a ward of the state and was taken in by Orem and Glassford to be a boarding student at their new school. The Children\u2019s Country School would become Cancilla\u2019s home for the next 15 years. He spent his entire childhood there and even lived on the campus while attending high school. To Cancilla, the 14-acre, tree-studded campus was home, \u201cI didn\u2019t think it was odd because I didn\u2019t know any different. I guess there were times I felt alone, like during the holidays when everybody went home but me and the caretakers. That was hard. I remember climbing up to the top of the hill behind the playing field and just sitting up there looking out and daydreaming. There were a few hard times, but mostly it was a happy place.\u201d
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Cancilla remembers the richness of his education here. \u201cThey wanted us to expand our interests, awareness, and knowledge. They believed in a complete education beyond the basics; they cared about things like how you react with other people and your work habits.\u201d At the school, he learned Latin and Greek. He learned to play the violin, sang in the choir, and learned to sing opera. In fact, he even wrote most of an opera in his middle school years. Cancilla and his classmates rode and cared for the horses on campus. He performed in multiple plays, where every student was required to learn every role and every line in case someone forgot during a performance. His favorite was Shakespeare\u2019s \u201c\u2018A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream\u2019 because I got to be Demetrius, one of the romantic leads, which seemed pretty exciting at that age.\u201d Cancilla swam in the old pool (which was recently uncovered on campus during construction of the Hub), and helped design and build \u201cThe Village of Friendly Relations\u201d when he was nine and ten years old. Cancilla says the little houses look like playhouses, but they were built for very practical reasons, \u201cThe founders wanted to help us be ready for life. They were practical women. We built a bank so we could learn about money. We made deposits and withdrawals and we learned to write checks to buy our school supplies in the little store we built.\u201d The Village of Friendly Relations also had a student-run post office, a tea house, and a newspaper office. Cancilla remembers having a job as a reporter for the school newspaper, \u201cFor my first assignment I had to profile the local undertaker.\u201d He also recalls a school trip to Santa Cruz where the older students decided to start hiking from school, intending to get a ride once the younger students were dropped off and the bus circled back around. By the time the bus got to them, the students had hiked all the way to Santa Cruz!
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Cancilla continued living at Hillbrook while attending Los Gatos High School. During his high school years, Cancilla swam, ran track, played in the orchestra and marching band, was in the choir, and on the student council. After graduation, he went on to study at U.C. Berkeley, double-majoring in electrical engineering and music. He sang in the California Choir and learned to play every instrument from strings to brass to percussion. He also learned how to ice-skate. \u201cIt was one of the offerings for P.E. and I had always wanted to try it and never had, so I thought, why not?\u201d He hasn\u2019t stopped skating since.
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Cancilla\u2019s career path after graduation from Cal is expansive, but some of the highlights include creating electrical diagrams for the company that designed all of the Safeway stores in California, working as a technical illustrator and commercial artist at General Electric where he drew piping plans for the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, joining Lockheed Engineering\u2019s Missile and Space Division as an electrical design draftsman on the Polaris Missile, and finally, being recruited by Stanford to work at the Linear Accelerator Complex doing design engineering. Cancilla worked at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory for 30 years. As he describes it, physicists came to him with experiment ideas and he would design the schematics or as he puts it, \u201cdesigning the toys for the physicists to play with.\u201d Cancilla worked with Wolfgang Panofsky, who oversaw construction of the linear accelerator and played a key role in creating the nuclear arms control movement, and he was there when two SLAC physicists won Nobel Prizes, Burton Richter in 1976 and Richard Taylor in 1990. But he says his most transformative work there may have been building a unit that could trace and analyze all of the electronics in the two-mile accelerator so that problems could be pinpointed down to the wire instead of searching blindly through SLAC\u2019s myriad of electronic equipment.
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Now retired, Cancilla hasn\u2019t slowed down. Twice a week, he laces up his skates and gets out on the ice. It\u2019s a great workout and a chance to socialize as well. \u201cIt\u2019s a community. I look forward to seeing my friends each week,\u201d says Cancilla. He is also a huge supporter of other skaters, \u201cIf I can say something to make somebody smile, or to encourage them, I do that. Anytime you can encourage another skater, that makes a difference.\u201d
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Besides staying physically active, his curious mind keeps him mentally fit as well, \u201cI\u2019ve always had an inquiring mind. I\u2019ve always wanted to research everything from music to language.\u201d Among other things, Cancilla is a deacon and sings in the choir at his church, Mountain View Japanese Seventh Day Adventist Church. He also sings at senior centers and rehabilitation facilities and has recently been busy writing orchestral suites. After discovering a medieval play in the Stanford Archives, Cancilla decided to put it to music and turn it into an opera. He also recently transcribed and transposed the opera he wrote as a boy at Hillbrook onto a computer to see what it sounded like. He thought it held up well, \u201cThe aria is pretty good. The opera is based on Frank Stockton\u2019s short story, The Lady or The Tiger?<\/em> My daughter wants me to finish it and maybe give it a happy ending.\u201d
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Cancilla has four adult children, two daughters and two sons as well as two granddaughters. His wife, Maxine, passed away four years ago. Cancilla is an important person to Hillbrook School; not only is he a link to our past, but he is also a shining example of a life dedicated to being curious, taking risks, being kind and always striving to be your best. Five years ago, Hillbrook created the Richerd Cancilla Award, which is Hillbrook\u2019s highest honor given to a volunteer in our community. So far, the award has been given to former Board Chair Steve Benjamin, former board member Chuck Geiger, and Jeff and Mafalda Straathof for their combined lifetime service to the school. Cancilla regularly visits Hillbrook, \u201cIt\u2019s where my heart is\u201d he says, \u201ceverybody needs a base, a home that grounds them and makes them whole. Hillbrook is my place, my home.\u201d Though much has changed since his early days there in the 1930s, the heart of Hillbrook remains the same, \u201cI can see it in the faces in the children at Hillbrook\u201d says Cancilla, \u201cit is still a joyful place where children are valued and made to feel capable.\u201d
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