‘He was completely fair, honest and sincere’

COSTA MESA — The first principal of Estancia High School was eulogized Fridays as a stoic man who loved to teach and administer.

He was also remembered as an Oklahoman who, as a child, would put a handkerchief over his face and trudge through the blinding dust to get to school during the days of the Dust Bowl.

Dozens of friends and family turned out at the commons inside Estancia to remember Floyd Harryman, who died at home in Costa Mesa on July 30. He was 92.

He was largely known for his intellectual curiosity and his open-minded attitude, not to mention his “open-door policy” as Estancia’s first principal in 1965.

Ed Conway, who first met Harryman in 1956 when the two were teachers at Newport Harbor High School, said that Harryman once gave him the opportunity to hire a new teacher when the pair worked side by side at the then-fledgling Estancia in the mid-1960s.

“Then one day he called me into the office and kept referring to me as Mr. Conway and was being unusually formal,” said Conway, recalling the incident. “He said, ‘Please shut the door behind you, Mr. Conway. Please, take a seat, Mr. Conway.’”

What ensued was the following:

“Mr. Conway,” Harryman had told him from behind his desk. “Your description of the new hire is all right, but we cannot advocate that the person be a non-smoker. It’s just not right.”

Given today’s times, the crowd at the memorial got a kick out of the anecdote, but the point was driven home: In Harryman’s eyes, everybody was on equal ground. He played no favorites.

“He went by the book,” Conway said. “He was completely fair, honest and sincere.”

He was also blunt.

When Harryman finally felt it was time to resign from his seat on the SchoolsFirst Board of Directors, a federal credit union that serves school employees in Orange County, Harryman, 83 at the time, merely pulled out a piece of paper and “scratched something out on it,” remembered Carl Manemann.

“That’s just the way he was,” said Manemann, minutes before the memorial service. “When he made up his mind, he acted on it.”

That’s because Harryman’s life was largely shaped by the rough and tumbleweed surroundings in which he grew up: Keyes, Okla.It was a farming community that turned desperately dry during a period known as the “Dirty 30s.” The wind storms forced Harryman’s family and thousands of others to look beyond the dry prairie and west to California.

The family of homesteaders eventually settled in Compton in 1936, later moving to Newport Beach. Harryman, at age 19, worked grocery store jobs while studying intensely at night, earning two degrees at UCLA.

It was a far cry from the parched, landlocked, 160-acre property the family grew up on up and had tried to farm — something surviving family members took note of when Harryman’s ashes were spread over Newport Beach Harbor last week.

Harryman’s younger sister, Leonda Renkin, now in her 80s, murmured that it was a scene the family never would have expected: spreading ashes over rose pedals as they floated in serene waters.

In His Words

“My dad worked on roads. He had built the roads in the eastern part of the county. One day I went to work with him. He and a group of farm boys were building a culvert, a low place in the road, so that water would cross under without washing the road out. They would work very fast, in a run, and at noon wrestle after lunch. I thought to myself this is not for me. I was 6 or 7 years old. My back would not be up to the strain. I then said I would go to college and I did.”

—Floyd Harryman