How Ed Balda — a once surfer, wannabe rockstar — ever ended up in a small corner of Hayden Catholic High School is relatively simple.
The old teacher has just never felt like quitting.
But like most everything else in Balda’s life, and the main thing he’s tried to impart on his students — the devil is in the details.
Balda, for the past half century, has been teaching students at various Topeka secondary schools not just the basics of art and metal-making, but an appreciation for craftwork, skill and history.
That approach is one that had made a difference for nearly 10,000 students who have all benefited from the life and art lessons that Balda provides.
“Mr. Balda is truly a living legend in the art education world,” said Brad LeDuc, an art teacher at Washburn Rural High School. “When an educator as talented as Balda spends 50-plus years in one city, there are countless students and teachers alike that have been inspired by his knowledge and wisdom. He is a founding member of the art scene we now know and appreciate in Topeka.
How Ed Balda fell into teaching art in Topeka
Born in Lawrence to an Ecuadoran dad and a Minnesotan mom, Balda moved around often as a kid, but he mainly attended high school next to the beaches of Santa Monica, California, in the 1960s.
“And that was trouble,” Balda said. “I wanted to be a surfer dude, making surfboards and being a part of a rock ‘n’ roll band. That’s when I got sent back to Kansas to get my education.”
The main devil he avoided as an ambitionless college kid at Ottawa University was military service, even though his number was called twice in the draft.
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“The draft card told me to pay my bills and write my will,” Balda said. “I ended up getting married and graduating while I was waiting. My parents paid for my college, and they suggested I study to be a teacher, and I started taking all the teaching classes. It was all of a semester back then — easy back then, but impossible now.”
After he graduated, Balda was still anxious to hear if and when he’d be sent off for military service. But the draft board, doing nothing to relieve that weight on his shoulders, kept telling him to stand by.
That’s when Balda got a job teaching art at a Highland Park Junior High School in a town called Topeka, so he tells it.
If he had any doubts about teaching before that, he was hooked from then on out.
“I was still a rascal then,” Balda said. “I was in my early 20s, and the kids were 17. I told them, ‘I know you, guys.’ Of course, they’ve stayed that same age, but the gap grew.”
Over the years, Balda gradually made his way around several Topeka schools, including French Middle School, Topeka West and Washburn Rural, where he helped manage a fledgling art department for a rapidly growing school.
He jokes and warns his students that he’s never really left high school in 50 years, and he knows every troublemaker’s trick.
“Kids are pretty much the same anywhere, but I’ve always been on their side,” Balda said. “I wouldn’t be here doing all this stuff if I didn’t believe in them.”
Art class wasn’t necessarily about art itself for Ed Balda
Even though Balda’s mostly taught art, he said he’s always encouraged his students to consider art through a historical lens as well and to have an appreciation for the past.
Even the cavemen, in their embers of ingenuity, made not only tools but also decorations, he reminds his pupils.
“We’re talking about that movie, ‘Oppenheimer,’ and I tell kids, the Nobel Peace Prize was created by the guy who invented dynamite,” Balda said. “Machine guns were originally meant to be protective. So many of our inventions and innovations — they end up being dark. But from those examples, we learn that mankind can create most anything it sets its mind to, so I teach them to go out and create more good. We need more good.”
In his class, there are no right answers but right approaches. In math class, the square root of 9 is always 3. But in Balda’s class, he explains, he and his students might like the answer at 4 — if it makes sense contextually.
It’s about being open-minded, and letting the kids explore, fail and learn from their mistakes, he said — even if the art itself is occasionally tangential to what he teaches.
“Kids have to face so much these days, and they have to find themselves,” Balda said. “If I can give them an out for 90 minutes each day, without being graded or criticized or bullied, then I hope they can get at least that.”
“My job isn’t to make stuff,” he continued. “It’s to educate them for the big world — the real world — and to make them cultured people who can appreciate time, history and their place on this doggone planet. That sounds highfalutin, but I truly believe that.”
For Ed Balda, connections with students are stories
Balda freely volunteers that he began teaching in January 1970, but he lets other people worry about the math to calculate how long he’s been teaching.
Now in his 70s, he has previously thought about retiring. It’d would let him have more time to more frequently visit Ecuador, where he owns some land. He even briefly switched to just substitute teaching, sometimes in his old classroom at Washburn Rural High School.
But that lifestyle didn’t quite fit him, and after searching for a smaller school to settle down, he took the art position at Hayden.
Sure, he’s a little slower, and he sometimes needs a little more coffee in the mornings, but he’s happy continuing to do what he does.
“Retirement is one of those American colloquialisms,” he said. “There’s this sentiment that when you’ve been there a while, you have to retire, go fishing and drown worms all day, you know? But I feel like I’m doing a job here, and so far, my health is still OK. Mentally, I can still think through all this. I don’t see a reason to retire, but I’ll probably feel it, intuitively, when it’s time.”
Meanwhile, Balda frequently receives letters and emails from the thousands of students he’s taught over the years. He’s sometimes astonished that a memory of a lesson he gave on throwing clay on a potter’s wheel can be significant enough for someone to remember 30 years later.
“At least it was a positive influence, and they’re not writing me from a prison cell,” he joked.
LeDuc, the Washburn Rural art teacher, had the privilege of succeeding Balda when he left that school.
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“Mr. Balda has likely never looked at teaching art as a job, but instead, an extension of being an artist,” LeDuc said. “He approaches teaching like working on a painting, which is often hard to know when you’re done. I feel this is the key to his longevity, combined with his engaging personality and ability to make those around him feel special.”
In the meantime and outside of teaching, Balda — an alumn of the Kansas City Art Institute — continues to paint, mainly paintings based on the South American coastal plains.
Most students don’t know the extent of that work, but a few of the keen-eyed ones occasionally recognize his work at shows around town and the region.
It’s that kind of attention to detail and history he hopes they take away from his classes, and one that can maybe become a story for him and his students.
“Everybody is a story,,” he said, “and I get to be a part of their stories, at least for a little while.”
Rafael Garcia is an education reporter for the Topeka Capital-Journal. He can be reached at rgarcia@cjonline.com or by phone at 785-289-5325. Follow him on Twitter at @byRafaelGarcia.
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