By PARUL GULIANI
Editor-in-Chief
On history teacher Bruce Baird’s first night in Thailand in the spring of 1982, he had just bought dinner from a vendor when a young boy approached him.
“Jontobota!” the boy shouted excitedly.
Baird didn’t understand. He thought the boy was speaking Thai.
“Jontobota! Jontobota!” the boy kept shouting. “Saturday Night Fever!”
“Oh!” Baird cried. “You mean, John Travolta.”
At those words, the boy began pointing at him excitedly. But Baird quickly informed him that he was not John Travolta.
Dr. Baird around the time he arrived in Bangkok weighing 160 lbs.
John Travolta in the movie Saturday Night Fever
As any high-school student who’s taken World Cultures knows, Baird is full of such stories.
“A lot of my anecdotes are embarrassing,” Baird said. “I was staying at a YMCA in Calcutta in 1982, and I was talking to two girls who said they were going to go see Mother Teresa.”
“Who’s that?” Baird asked. “They said Mother Teresa was a saintly woman who lived right down the street.”
He decided not to go with them. He had never heard of Mother Teresa.
Another time, Baird was riding a bus from Singapore to Malacca in Malaysia when the driver, while trying to merge into the leftmost lane, slid the bus off the road into a 10-foot embankment.
The bus landed on its side. While many passengers were injured, Baird was not.
“The first thing that popped into my mind was, the bus is gonna blow up,” Baird said. “That’s always what happens in the movies.”
He scrambled out of one of the broken windows and gazed at the damage. The bus did not blow up.
Realizing that some people were hurt, Baird went back into the bus and helped them out, making sure that everyone injured was driven to the hospital.
ARCO Houston Refinery
But Baird’s life wasn’t always this interesting.
After graduating from Texas A&M University with a B.S. in chemical engineering, he worked as a chemical engineer at ARCO in Houston for three years before transferring to the division in Alaska.
Knowing he’d be moving to Alaska, he spent his third year training two people to replace him.
“I had a very intuitive approach to problem-solving,” Baird said. “It was very hard to teach these people what I did. I started wondering, how do you teach people anything?”
Dr. Baird two months after the above photo meeting his father at the Amsterdam airport and weighing only 130 lbs.
Since then, Baird had a growing desire to return to college to learn to teach.
So, after his six-month leave of absence (during which Baird also contracted an amoeba—leaving him sick for three months—after drinking unpurified water in India), Baird enrolled at the University of Alaska instead of returning to ARCO.
“I never did learn to teach people how to solve problems,” Baird said. “They don’t teach you that (in college).”
Baird said his first teaching experience was frustrating. He taught at a middle school in McGrath, Alaska—“a little town in the middle of nowhere.”
“I felt like I was a prison guard,” Baird said. “I felt like I was thrown to the lions.”
When he began teaching there, he found out that the students had drugged their last teacher’s coffee.
“I was always watching my back,” Baird said.
Realizing that he did not want to be a teacher, Baird retired. He spent six years traveling and doing “whatever (he) felt like doing.”
“I didn’t have to worry about money,” Baird said. “I had plenty left over from my ARCO days.”
Traveling in third-world countries, he added, was cheap.
In India, Baird lived in an international community called “Auroville”—where “people from all over the world lived together in harmony”—for $2 a day.
Dr. Baird helped build the Matrimandir during the time he was living in Auroville
The community—though secular—was made up of devout followers of the Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo. To Baird, it seemed like a cult.
Sri Aurobindo
He soon learned that the people of “Auroville” did not live in harmony. Arguing and backstabbing were common.
“I got interested in how people live together,” Baird said. “I wanted to create a better world. I was very idealistic.”
Baird soon realized he was as passionate about history as he was about traveling.
Once Baird’s wife—then a Montessori teacher—became pregnant, he realized it was time to get “a real job.” The two settled in Virginia, and Baird returned to college once again—this time, to become a college professor.
He enrolled in the American Studies program at the College of William and Mary, and then received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Florida in 1995. After completing his post-doc at Ohio State University, Baird taught at the University of Alabama at Huntsville for three years before returning to California.
He then taught middle school for a year in Santa Rosa (“middle school kids are just another breed . . . I cannot deal with them”) and substituted for a year at public schools before applying for a job at SCDS, nine years ago.
“From there, the stories become boring,” Baird said.