PORT ANGELES — Dennis Duncan’s father was a logger, a Port Angeles man who worked long and hard through the 1930s. While Duncan was growing up here, he didn’t get to see much of his dad.
So when he became a parent, Duncan knew he wanted to be there for his kids. He set his mind and heart to learning stories. And for his son Pete and daughters Christine, Kathy, Laura and Linda, he spun those sagas and fairy tales at bedtime.
As a young dad, Duncan had his hands full, with five children and a full-time job. He wasn’t really looking for another occupation.
But his wife, Dorothy, heard a presentation one day. She was a Clallam County commissioner at the time; a storyteller came to a commissioners’ meeting and impressed her.
Dorothy suggested to her husband that he might be good at this storytelling thing.
He didn’t think so. But Duncan, a schoolteacher, was persuaded to try it anyway. And as he began telling stories outside the home, he found himself embellishing, going off “on flights of fancy.”
Audiences went with him. “You have a gift,” fans told him.
That was 18 years ago. Duncan, who’ll be 79 in September, has since transfixed thousands of children with tales told the old-fashioned way: sitting in a kid-size chair with a flock of classmates around him.
If Duncan were a website, he would have had 9,000 hits this past year alone. Though long retired from teaching, he frequently visits Franklin, Jefferson and Dry Creek elementary schools to tell stories, play thinking games — and urge kids to question what he says.
One June morning at Jefferson Elementary School — Duncan’s own alma mater — the storyteller paid a visit to Evan Murphy’s combined second- and third-grade classroom. And though the end of the school year was very near, there was not a squirm to be seen. The kids turned their faces toward Duncan as if he were the sun itself.
The storyteller, meanwhile, needed no grand gestures nor props to hold his listeners’ attention. His voice stayed soft, a murmur meandering down an imaginary path. He’d raise his hands now and then, but mostly he leaned forward, just like the kids did.
Duncan has made more than 30 visits to Murphy’s classroom in the 2012-2013 school year. So Murphy, informing his students that this would be the last story before summer vacation, asked for requests.
The kids listed 21 of the 30 stories they had heard from Duncan over the past nine months. “Rumpelstiltskin,” “The Apple of Contentment,” “The Boy Who Was Never Afraid,” “The Giving Tree,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Wiley and the Hairy Man,” “The Queen Bee,” “The Edge of the World” — these and other Duncan renditions deal with the big issues of life.
There’s a triangle, Duncan says, that brings people together: storyteller, story, listener.
“His personality is so quiet,” said Murphy, “yet his ideas are so big . . . he discusses real-life dilemmas of right and wrong, cause and effect, and often he asks students what they think of an outcome.
“They soak in his stories,” Murphy said.
“The time Mr. Duncan shares with students is the kind of quality time you would hope to get from a member of your own family.”
Murphy watches his students stretch, too. Duncan “gets them to pay close attention to details
. . . [to] making connections with their own lives.”
Duncan and his audiences together stroll a path lined with questions. The storyteller is there, he believes, to spark questions in those young minds.
After teaching school for 37 years, Duncan wrote a book, The Question Games, about his own journey to a new way of learning.
Duncan graduated from Crescent High School in 1952, in a class of three seniors, and went to Western Washington College of Education in Bellingham, now Western Washington University. By 1955, he was facing a roomful of students.
“I had little notion of how students really learned,” he recalls in his book. “[I] began my career teaching the way I had been taught.
“My first year was one of shock and dismay. I thought I was a warden in a prison camp
. . . I was becoming quite cynical and adopted coercive behaviors, full of threats and relying on grade structures to keep going from day to day.”
Duncan moved from district to district before becoming a science teacher. He discovered that many of his students enjoyed this subject, and slowly, he developed hands-on science lessons.
“Then came an event that changed my professional life forever,” Duncan writes. He was selected to attend a Northwest Regional Education workshop in Seattle, a series on “Inquiry Development.” It was about turning the classroom into a place where each student grows confident in his or her inquiry and creative problem-solving skill.
Duncan, in his words, was “swept up in the excitement of it.”
As he applied this creative-thinking process in his classroom, something astonishing happened.
“As my teaching strategies changed, I found my classroom full of students alert, alive and excited about being there. This made all the difference,” he writes.
“Students were staying after school to talk,” he added. “Their eyes lit up
. . . [as they were] really learning.”
He’s still seeing those lights, bright and clear. In Murphy’s classroom, Duncan played a numbers game, urging the students to ask questions about the number he was thinking of. They did, posing queries and trying out answers, as Duncan nodded and leaned forward some more.
“Keep working at it till you get there,” he told the kids. “Wrong answers are good answers.”
In The Question Games, Duncan has many more thinking games using numbers, words and logic.
“As my career evolved, I reached for changes,” Duncan writes. “I was reading every book on learning theory I could find and attending workshops that were on the cutting edge. I was thinking about learning; learning about thinking.
“I love teaching,” Duncan said that morning at Jefferson Elementary. “It’s one of the few things I do well.”
Karen Hanan could list others. She’s known Duncan a good 21 years.
Back when she was dreaming up Port Angeles’ Juan de Fuca Festival of the Arts, both Dennis and Dorothy Duncan cheered her on. Then, once the annual Juan de Fuca Festival got going, Hanan invited the Duncans to stage their Port Angeles Children’s Theatre performances on the festival’s Chamber Stage.
These performances were a hit for several years, Hanan said.
She later got to know him as a force behind the Forest Storytelling Festival, an event that will mark its 19th run this Oct. 18-20.
Besides his school visits, Duncan also spins yarns for adults, at festivals and the occasional Story Swap hosted by the Story People of Clallam County. This summer, he plans to do some telling at Country Aire Natural Foods, 200 W. First St.
For the older crowd, one of his favorites is the true tale of delivering his daughter Laura. She was born on the Morse Creek hill, in the Duncans’ Volkswagen bug.
Dorothy and Dennis Duncan’s children are all grown up now with kids of their own. The Duncans were married 55 years, the last of which Hanan recalled with fondness.
“Last but not least, I knew him as the caregiver for Dorothy, patient and always loving,” she said. Duncan nursed for his wife as she developed Alzheimer’s disease, until her death in December 2008.
Like her husband, Dorothy Duncan invested her energy in children — in her home and in the community at large. She was a champion of First Step Family Support Center, which in 2010 named its new Sixth Street building the Dorothy Duncan Learning Center.
In addition to sewing costumes and playing roles in Children’s Theatre productions, Dorothy was the first female mayor of Port Angeles in the late 1970s. In the following decade, she served three terms as county commissioner.
These days, Duncan continues to honor his wife’s memory. He volunteers as a storyteller, doing what she suggested so long ago.
