RETIRED TEACHER, COVID-19 VICTIM REMEMBERED AS ‘GENTLE GIANT’

News of the death of retired teacher Ralph Dotinga sparked some classroom memories from his past students, including Will Chandler of Chula Vista.

“I have always remembered Ralph with gladness and gratitude, for his great skills as teacher, and particularly for his kindness, decency and determination to reach all of his students,” Chandler wrote in an email to Dotinga’s son, Randy Dotinga. “There must be many hundreds of people out there who will always recall him with admiration and thanks.”

Dotinga died of COVID-19 on Dec. 23. He was 85 and left behind a wife, Sudelle, and sons Randy and Darrell.

Chandler’s recollection of his old sixth-grade teacher at Flower Street School (now Feaster Charter School in Chula Vista) is that much more remarkable considering that he was in Dotinga’s class in the 196061 school year.

Randy Dotinga, a freelance journalist in San Diego, wasn’t too surprised that one of his father’s students still remembered him fondly 60 years removed from his classroom.

“He was an extremely friendly, warm guy,” Dotinga said. “He had a lot of health problems in his later years, but it never seemed to get him down. He was as warm and friendly as always.”

Ralph Dotinga was the son of Dutch immigrants who had a dairy farm in Hemet, where he grew up. Hay fever prevented him from going into the family business, so instead he enrolled at San Diego State College and went into education. He taught elementary school in Chula Vista from the late 1950s until his retirement 30 years ago. Randy Dotinga said the story of his parents meeting was a tall tale in a literal sense. His father was 6 feet, 6 inches tall, and some women in the school’s faculty lounge arranged for him to sit next to another teacher named Sudelle, 5 feet, 10 inches.

“They saw they were both tall and would make a great match, and they did,” Randy said. The two were married in 1967.

“You could say he was a gentle giant,” said Randy, who is 6 feet, 7 inches.

After Ralph’s retirement, the couple moved to Oceanside and later to an assisted living community in Escondido, where he served on the residence council and enjoyed life, his son said.

Ralph fell and injured his leg at home Nov. 20 and was taken to Palomar Medical Center, where an X-ray detected a broken knee. To the family’s surprise, he also tested positive for the coronavirus.

“This was the worse-case scenario, something I’ve been really worried about the whole time we had the pandemic,” Randy said. “I kept thinking this pandemic is going to get closer and closer to each of us. I was worried it was going to get to my parents, and it did.”

Randy said his father could not return home because the injury had left him bed-ridden, and he also could not be transferred to a skilled nursing facility for physical therapy because he had COVID-19. He spent the next month at the hospital, isolated from everyone except the medical staff, and at times he became disoriented.

“At one point he called me at 4 a.m. and wanted me to call 911,” he said. “He knew something was wrong but didn’t understand what it was. At one time he texted me the word ‘Help,’ and I didn’t even know he knew how to text. He was in a room and didn’t know what was going on. He only knew he needed help. That’s one of the horrors of this disease. We couldn’t be there to hold his hand or talk to him.”

Randy said he got the phone call he had been dreading on Dec. 23. He had not seen his father in months leading up to his death, and he still hasn’t been able to visit his mother, who had COVID-19 but has recovered, because of restrictions against visitors where she lives.

Randy said his father’s best friend and former colleague Dave Casey, also had COVID-19, and Casey’s wife, Beth, died of the disease.

He has little patience for anyone who would suggest that his father’s passing was because of his advanced age or pre-existing health conditions.

“His pre-existing condition was being alive, and now he’s not,” he said. “He had more time to live. More time to be a father. More time to be a husband and a friend. This disease robbed him of that, and he passed away in an agonizing cascade of complications while he was alone and isolated.”

In announcing his father’s death on Twitter, Randy wanted to remind people that the COVID-19 deaths reported each day are all individuals.

“He’s one of the 330,000plus now, an anonymous number,” Randy wrote. “But he had a name. Two, actually. The world called him Ralph Dotinga, but to me he was just Dad.”