Trumbull, Weston educator William Goldstein dies at 93
TRUMBULL — William Goldstein, a public school headmaster and superintendent who worked in Trumbull, Weston and Rocky Hill, has died.
His family announced Monday that Goldstein died earlier this summer at St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Bridgeport of complications from heart disease and old age.
His son, Californiabased television and filmwriter and actor Howie Gold, on Monday described his father as a complex, humorous man — a deeply intellectual, commanding individual who loved schools and education, writing and athletics, Mozart and the Boston Red Sox.
“He was larger than life and charismatic,” Gold said. “The kids loved him, and that was really in many ways the highlight of his life. He wanted to run a high school. He loved the interaction with the kids. The student-athletes he just had a special place for, and they liked him in return. He had a very good relationship with the kids.”
Goldstein was headmaster of Trumbull High School in 1969 and saw the town’s high school move to a new building in its present location at 72 Strobel Road in 1972. He later served as headmaster of Weston High School while also teaching at Hunter College and Western Connecticut State. He was also
superintendent of schools in Rocky Hill during his lengthy career. But it was his tenure at THS that Goldstein was probably proudest of, his son said.
Gifted with a tremendous vocabulary, Goldstein loved to hold court at holidays, sitting at the head of the table carving up the turkey, Gold said. In addition, he said, he had a very good sense of humor and a real facility for imitating accents.
To Fairfield County residents who remember him, Goldstein was a legendary educator, said Anne Kearns, a member of the THS Class of 1976.
“He was basically a legend back then in the 1970s because, I think, of his personality,” Kearns said Monday. “He was always around the students. Students would just stop by his house and he would invite them in to talk and sit on his couch. He was that kind of guy. He was someone that you couldn’t forget — very memorable.”
Goldstein was truly an educator of the 1970s. He was compassionate and had a streak of iconoclasm, Kearns said. One student writing on a Trumbull High Facebook page described how he was “bebopping past the entrance to the school music room with Beatles music playing from his sound system” — a cassette player — when the music teacher yelled at him for creating a distraction with the music.
Goldstein, who was about 50 feet away, replied that the student was, after all, doing something that any music teacher would want to see — enjoying music.
That was pure Goldstein, Kearns said.
“When he saw something like that, he called them (teachers) out. When students got picked on, he spoke up,” Kearns said. “He laid down the rules, too. He wasn’t that easygoing.”
A pragmatist, Goldstein did things in the 1970s that might seem shocking today, Kearns said.
“He supported nontraditional clubs, including WTHS — a student ‘radio station’ that broadcast music in the commons. He was OK with underground newspapers as long as they were respectful and didn’t bully,” she said.
“It sounds odd today, but when he was headmaster, smoking was legal for people over 16, and Doc Goldstein helped students when they asked for a smoking lounge — in part because it would make it easier to stop people from smoking in the bathrooms.”
A proud man, Goldstein was not shy about his accomplishments, insisting after he earned a Ph.D. that everybody call him doctor, or just plain Doc. And he could be demanding of his family, too, Gold said.
“His friends from Rocky Hill (schools) said he ran the place too much like a dictator. There was a little of that on the parenting side of things,” Gold said. “I think he liked my personality, but it was not particularly easy with him, for sure.”
Goldstein’s enjoyment of student-athletes likely grew out of his own athleticism: his toughness, perhaps right from birth.
Born in Bremen, Germany in 1930, Goldstein was 7 when his Jewish family escaped Nazi persecution and settled in the Malden area of Massachusetts. As much as he loved intellectual pursuits, the 5’10” Goldstein played baseball and basketball and was enamored of boxing.
Goldstein served as a lieutenant and captain in the U.S. Army’s 11th Airborne Division, the “Arctic Angels,” but always called himself a parachutist, his son said.
“He was very proud of being a parachutist. It became a real staple of his post-career life, talking about it, having it as his license plate,” Gold said. “I think he called himself a parachutist because he never saw combat. It was more subconscious than anything else.”
Much later in life, Gold took his father to the first Mickey Ward-Arturo Gatti welterweight fight, which he loved, his son said.
His massive amounts of energy made Goldstein enjoyable, often entertaining, but also exhausting, Gold said.
“What he liked, he was obsessed with,” Gold said. “He loved the violence of ‘The Sopranos’ and military movies and football and boxing. And yet ... he could rattle off Irish poets and this and that, Shakespeare.”
His son regrets that his father never got to see, since his death, all of the people upon whom he had ani mpact, Gold said.
“I wish he was alive to see how people feel about him. I don’t think he realized that people would remember him that well. People remember.”