Donald Bockler, at 64; science teacher and tour guide

DONALD BOCKLER

As he had been for two decades, Arlington science teacher Donald J. Bockler was a major player in Boston's five-hour Big Foot Labor Day Tour of historic sites of the city he loved and knew so well.

The theme of this year's tour - always sponsored by the nonprofit Boston By Foot - was "Front Page News: Exploring 20th Century Boston."

"Don was also incredibly stubborn about the tour. He was adamant about walking 20 minutes out of the way to see the site of the Dennison House, where Amelia Earhart once worked," said Olivia Samwong Handerson, who cochaired the tour with him. "Don was just beaming all day. I think he was especially happy to have [his wife] Marzina walk the entire tour with him."

Mr. Bockler died of an apparent heart attack the next day, Sept. 2, at his Belmont home, said his wife. He was 64 and had taught science at Arlington High School for 35 years.

Several weeks before the Labor Day tour, Mr. Bockler and his wife had completed a 105-mile canoe trip on the Missouri River with longtime friends, Stuart and Pam Davis of Arlington, Va. "Don had a tremendous range of interests," Stuart Davis said. "A lot of history - scientific, medieval, medical - and a tremendous collection of books about Boston's history and ecology."

Joanne Coakley of Belmont, a teaching colleague, said he considered each of the 5,000 books he had at home "essential to his teaching and learning." In her eulogy, she said the Bockler library included tomes on stars, insects, global warming, Mahler's Ninth Symphony, and Spanish guitar music.

In 2003, Mr. Bockler was inducted into the Massachusetts Hall of Fame for Science Educators for his teaching of biology and for giving his students on-site knowledge of environmental issues. He earned an Excellence in Environmental Education award from the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Affairs that same year.

"Don was a born teacher," said Thomas Vaughn of Billerica, a former colleague at Arlington High who nominated Mr. Bockler for the Hall of Fame. "Don was a modest gentleman totally dedicated to his students and passionate about his teaching."

He would do anything to engage his students' minds, colleagues said.

"Competition was tough for seats in Don's classes," Coakley said. She recalled that each year when he introduced the topic of evolution, "he would assume [Charles] Darwin's total character for the day, complete with British accent, Victorian costume, makeup, and the stooped posture of an aged biologist.

" 'I want to be like Doc Boc when I grow up' was a constant refrain of his students," Coakley said.

Many of them succeeded. Heather Pacheco, a science teacher at Framingham High School, took one of the advanced placement science courses Mr. Bockler designed. "Mr. Bockler's classes were really rigorous," she said, adding that the college-level biology he taught "made you feel part of an elite.

"He really fostered our love of science and the process of learning about science. Rather than just be in the classroom, he encouraged us to look outward at the world around us, kind of through the lens of science," Pacheco said.

He was one of the founders of Arlington High's Outdoor Winter Survival Program, in which he would take students to Maine or a Boston Harbor island in the winter, giving them three matches to start a fire, along with food and plastic sheeting to survive several days.

"Once we went to Townsend State Park and camped out in the middle of winter," Pacheco recalled. "Mr. Bockler had us looking at plants and ecosystems, so he really opened our eyes to seeing all the nuances of winter when it seems everything is shut down."

In his signature bow ties, Mr. Bockler "looked scholarly with perhaps a bit of an absent-minded-professor air," said Handerson.

Mr. Bockler was born in St. Paul. He graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1965 with a bachelor's degree in psychology and zoology. He worked his way through college, his wife said, by playing bass guitar in a polka band and a rock band and earned a master's degree in education in 1966.

Soon after college, he taught at the American School in Lima for two years, and then taught another year in Puerto Rico. This experience whetted his appetite for foreign travel, Stuart Davis said, and he traveled the world, at first alone, and then with Marzina.

The couple met after he started teaching at Arlington High in 1972. Marzina also taught biology there. They wed in 1983.

Together, they started the survival course for his students.

Vaughn said Mr. Bockler brought cutting-edge science into his classroom by attending workshops at Genzyme Corp. and the Whitehead Institute, both in Cambridge.

Though he retired in 2004, his wife said, Mr. Bockler continued to teach at Harvard Extension School and filled in at Concord-Carlisle High School.

"Really great teachers are like Don," said Jacques Duranceau, a younger-generation science teacher at Arlington High. "They get better and better with time."

In addition to his wife, Mr. Bockler leaves a sister, Diane Siebert, and a brother, Harold, both of South St. Paul.

Services have been held.