Beloved teacher Roger Taguchi was the ‘whirlwind’ of Hillcrest High

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With his “triple buckeye” study tips, mad scientist explosions, limitless enthusiasm, and ever present white lab coat and camera, Roger Taguchi was a legend at Hillcrest High School for more than three decades.

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“He was a whirlwind,” said Lisa Murray, a former Hillcrest student who was part of the school’s Taguchi-coached Reach for the Top team that won the national championship in 1980.

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Taguchi, who taught chemistry, math and science at Hillcrest from 1972 to 2004, died Nov. 8, two days after suffering a catastrophic brain injury in a fall from a ladder. He was 78.

“When I think of Roger Taguchi, I only see him laughing with a big smile on his face,” Murray said. “I can’t recall a time that he wasn’t in a good mood and laughing. There will never be another Roger Taguchi.”

Tributes from former students filled social media following news of his death, many writing moving tributes about his influence on their lives.

“To my favorite teacher. The one who inspired my love for science. The one who pushed me harder. The one who showed us what passion for your profession looks like,” wrote George Zahalan, owner of Valley Health Pharmacies in Ottawa, who graduated from Hillcrest in 2006.

“He was the best teacher. We had the best experiments. The best explanations,” Zahalan said, recalling how Taguchi used the famous Zapruder film of the assassination of John F. Kennedy to demonstrate the principles of physics.

“He could be stern too,” Zahalan said, recalling a difficult time when his home life was in turmoil and his school work suffered.

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“I always had high grades, but Mr. Taguchi noticed me slipping and he pulled me aside and said, ‘George, if you’re not going to give it your all, tell me now. I know you’re going through a lot, but I have faith in you. Do not let outside things impact you. It’s only going to make you feel worse and be more damaging to your self confidence.’ ”

“Maybe one day I can think of him without crying. He saved my life,” wrote another former student on the Mr. Taguchi Fan Club Facebook page, which was created after Taguchi’s retirement 17 years ago and is still going strong. “Brilliant, funny, kind, generous, astute, empathetic, ethical, and the most adventurous teacher I’ve ever had. A world without Mr. Taguchi is duller, sadder, and significantly less wondrous.”

Roger Taguchi was born Nov. 29, 1945 in Winnipeg. His father, Ken Taguchi, a fisherman from Steveston, B.C., had narrowly avoided being interned during the Second World War with other Japanese-Canadians. The reason? He was one of only a handful of chicken sexers and spent the war plying his unusual skill on a Manitoba farm.

Roger, the third of four children, studied science at McMaster University before beginning a PhD at the University of Toronto with future Nobel Prize winner, John Polayni. The two had a falling out, however, and Taguchi walked away from academia to become a teacher.

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“He was a legend,” said Brian Stokoe, a retired physics teacher who was at Hillcrest when Taguchi was hired in 1972. Stokoe was one of a group of teachers who were asked to vet a list of three potential hires.

“We all agreed that Roger was the one we wanted,” Stokoe recalled. “You just had to look at his qualifications.”

Taguchi, in his buttoned-down shirts, blue jeans and lab coat, took the school by storm with his adventurous, unorthodox teaching. The ceiling of his chemistry lab was stained with smoke from his explosive demonstrations. Famously, he would take students to the Rideau River for dramatic demonstrations, hurling chunks of sodium and potassium into the water.

Many recalled his “triple buckeyes” advice — the three asterisks he’d use to denote an especially important fact to remember. Many said they still use the method today.

Murray never had Taguchi as a teacher, but spent four years on the Hillcrest team for Reach for the Top, a nationally broadcast quiz show on the CBC that ran from 1962 to 1985. (Jeopardy’s Alex Trebek was a former host as was Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe.)

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“Mr. Taguchi showed up and took us to the next level,” Murray recalled. “We were fierce.”

Taguchi had carousels full of slides of famous paintings he used to grill the team.

“We always had someone who was good at math and someone who was good at history. But every game there would be 30 or 40 points for art and Mr. Taguchi never wanted to leave those points on the table.

“He’d show a slide and say, ‘This is Canaletto and this is how you know: It’s from far away and the people are teeny tiny.’ To this day, I can go into a gallery and say, ‘Oh! That’s a Canaletto!’ ”

He did the same with audio recordings of opera and classical music, and would impart his own mnemonics for obscure facts.

“The Dionne quintuplets? Easy!” he’d say, “It’s M-A-C-E-Y!” Murray said.

Sure enough, in one episode contestants were asked to name the the famous quints.

“I buzzed and said, ‘Marie, Annette, Cécile, Emilie and Yvonne,’ Murray said. “People looked at me and said, ‘How do you know that?’ ”

Taguchi’s love for quizzes and trivia continued after his retirement. He coached several teams that competed in pub trivia nights. That’s how Myfanwy Davies met him.

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“He was a remarkable man,” Davies said. “Apart from his amazing brain, he was kind and generous.  He would share his knowledge with us, and always liked to play as a team, rather than individually.  He took great pleasure in helping others feel a sense of accomplishment. He has left a big hole in our trivia teams,” Davies said.

Taguchi offered personal coaching as Davies prepared for her appearance on the king of all trivia shows, Jeopardy!, in 2014.

Though slight of build, Taguchi also coached the boys rugby team. In 2001, the Citizen did a story about how the school wouldn’t pay to send the team to a tournament. Taguchi paid the $1,900 travel cost out of his own pocket.

Many of Taguchi’s students were inspired to go on in the sciences, but the skills he taught were universal. He developed a Science in Society course that delved into human nature itself, with topics such as autism, schizophrenia, addiction and homelessness, even probing the minds of serial killers such as Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and Paul Bernardo.

“Mr. Taguchi stoked in me a great desire to continually strive to understand and relate to all types of people, thanks to his Science in Societies class,” said Stephane St-Jean, who graduated in 1998 and is now a barber in Tsawwassen, B.C. “Now, as a very happy barber, that desire to understand people and accept their differences, has made my work very easy in terms of connecting with the people sitting in my chair.”

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For the past 20 years, Taguchi was also a caregiver, living with his younger brother, Dwight, in a house on Knox Crescent in Riverview Park. Dwight struggled for many years with mental illness and died in July at age 69.

Taguchi is survived by his brother, Neil, and sister, Elaine, who attended a memorial service in his honour in Ottawa on Nov. 29. Fittingly, the program contained a 15-question trivia quiz about Taguchi’s life and interests.

Murray, who lives in Toronto and was unable to attend, says she’s still grateful for the lessons she learned from Taguchi on the Reach for the Top team.

“We were the geeky kids,” she said. “We weren’t athletic. None of us dated. But we hung around together. We felt like we belonged. If we hadn’t had the Reach for the Top group, there would have been a lot of geeky lonely kids out there. He made it fun.”

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