Popular teacher known for wit
Had compassion, sense of humour
Teacher Frank Mazzara could take an awkward kid and make him feel like a champion.
He would have the audience in hysterics with his cameos in Colchester North Public School’s annual musicals. He loved sports and volunteered as a track coach after retiring from Gosfield North Public School. He was a former president of the Rotary Club of Essex and his warmth and wit made him a popular emcee for community events.
Mr. M., as he was known, died May 20 from complications after a kidney transplant. He was 63.
“He was a great, great man,” said longtime friend and co-worker Dan Cox. “He was the mentor, he was the coach, he was the guidance counsellor without the title.”
Mazzara worked with children with special needs. He became a vice-principal believing he could better advocate for special education as an administrator, said his wife Eleanor. “I’m getting condolences from kids he taught 30 years ago,” Eleanor said. The outpouring of grief has touched her.
Mazzara’s first teaching post was at Maplewood Public School in Essex. Students from his first class still get together for reunions. A group of the girls, now grown women with families of their own, would always stop in to visit Mazzara at home. “My girls,” Mazzara called them.
Mazzara retired nine years ago after a 30-year teaching career. “He went into renal failure right after retiring,” Eleanor said. Dialysis stabilized his condition until he got a kidney transplant three weeks before his death. A blood clot — a complication from the otherwise successful surgery — felled him while Eleanor was out grocery shopping for the foods he could finally eat.
Mazzara was born in Sicily and came to Canada as a child. His father moved the family first to France. Mazzara had an older sister born in Italy, and two younger ones born in France and Canada. He also had two step-sisters.
“He’s an Italian man with five sisters, so he was spoiled,” Eleanor said with a laugh.
A nod to his heritage, Mazzara would play the accordion every chance he got.
Eleanor met her husband 39 years ago when they were both teaching at the same school. They had two children — daughter Erin, now a teacher in South Korea, and son Zachary, a chef in Amherstburg — and adopted a daughter from Haiti, Gill, now a nurse’s aide in Montreal.
Mazzara loved children and it showed in everything he did.
Cox said students trusted Mazzara because it was clear he cared about them. Cox said he always directed a school production and Mazzara insisted on having a part.
“I gave him a script to work with, but he never read it.”
In the Sound of Music, Mazzara ad-libbed the role of the bishop who married Maria and Georg von Trapp.
In Joseph, Mazzara dressed in drag and played a woman.
In Annie Get Your Gun, there was no part for him, so Mazzara rode in on horseback 30 seconds into intermission claiming to be the Sheriff of Gesto.
“Audiences loved him,” Cox said. “Everyone did.”