Reno Taini has been many things: safari guide in east Africa, explorer-biologist in Mexico, rope-climbing instructor in countries as far-flung as Myanmar and northern Ireland. Closer to home, he’s the teacher who, while looking down over a Peninsula graveyard from a school district office, coined the phrase, “It’s good to be alive in Colma,” the town where the vast numbers of dead people in cemeteries greatly outnumber those still walking the earth.
But what the pioneering educator remains most proud of are his nearly four decades taking troubled and at-risk Bay Area youngsters out into the world, mostly into nature for hiking, backpacking, trail-building, and rope-climbing, but also inside an infamous prison, and, carrying meals, into the homes of people dying from AIDS. Kids learned to surmount challenges, survive discomfort, collaborate and mitigate risk. Highest on Taini’s goals list were instilling confidence and compassion as foundations for their futures.
Taini, now 84, started a wilderness program for students in 1967 at Jefferson High School in Daly City, an initiative that continues to this day as the Wilderness School for students in the Jefferson Union High School District in Daly City, Pacifica, Brisbane, and Colma. Also remaining are rope-climbing courses he created in a redwood forest in La Honda and in eucalyptus groves on San Bruno Mountain.
Taini has been retired from teaching since 2007, but his work with students is immortalized in the documentary Reno’s Kids. A few of the young people he helped guide to adulthood are dead, but most still walk the earth, carrying lessons from their time in the wilderness program. Taini shepherded more than 2,000 students through the program, and his own lessons learned from them reverberate in his memory. “How lucky I was to have these kids,” Taini says. “They were connected to truth.”
This news organization caught up with Taini recently at his home in Woodside. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What attracted you to working with kids often struggling in school and life?
A: I didn’t have any brothers and sisters. My parents were really old school Italian. I went to an underdog school. The nuns taught, and the nuns weren’t really qualified. I had problems in my ears. I was put in the section of the class with the slower kids. They just put me in the corner and I looked out the window, I watched birds making nests.
Q: How did the wilderness program develop?
A: I didn’t start it predicting it was going to go anywhere. I just wanted to get kids out on field trips. I went out every Friday. I’d take them anywhere in the county that had parks or something to see. Back then there was a budget. We got all kinds of federal money in the mid-’60s to develop education. I used to take them over to San Quentin prison. The main mission is to get these kids not only to come to school but to get something out of it, for their future. All of a sudden they start to feel, “I got a life here.” We were crossing the color line, we were crossing the gender line, we were crossing all kinds of lines.
Q: The program first started at Hidden Villa in Los Altos Hills, the ranch of Josephine and Frank Duveneck, is that right?
A: I had to get a place to take these kids from Daly City. Daly City was kind of a rougher spot. The kids that I had, they were tough kids. I can’t take them to a regular campsite or something like that. I’ve got to have some space. I go up to the house there, and I walk in. I look on the wall there and I see a picture of a black baby and a white baby playing together. I go, “Holy (expletive), this is different.” I was told that Josephine would be out in a while. All of a sudden here she comes out, on one side of her was Cesar Chavez, on the other side was Joan Baez. She goes out and wishes them bye and then she turns to me. We hit it off really well.
Q: How did the ropes course in La Honda come about?
A: I used to take the students down there to help clean the trails. They’d do all the trails in exchange for about an hour of outdoor education work, being instructed about the flora and fauna, and food. Food was everything — some of these kids weren’t eating very well. We’d go and have a huge lunch and get some instruction. In La Honda you had some of the biggest trees in the world. I got permission to start building the ropes course. It was mostly about turning the kids loose to be able to build it. We had a lot of disabled kids. We had kids in wheelchairs — we had ropes tied to the things. All of our kids helped them. We’re teaching bravery, we’re teaching communications, were teaching the environment, and of course we’re teaching the cohesiveness of people.
Q: What were your goals with the wilderness program, for the students?
A: Just getting them to have the confidence to use the life they have the best they can. My goal was to get them to express a lot of the pure life force that they had, to get a job, to get a family, to help themselves out, to be brave. It was all about compassion. We were always in a circle, we were always talking with each other. Inclusion was important. These were diverse kids.
Q: What’s the value in that diversity?
A: Everyone’s got an answer — it’s like contributing to the stew. They have different flavors, different ways of looking at stuff. But you’ve got to be able to communicate with them.
Q: How do you do that, as a teacher?
A: They’ve got to see you as vulnerable. A lot of that is because of the outdoors. You get thirsty, you get hungry, all this basic stuff, and you’re doing it together and you’re laughing together.
Q: Have you heard from any of the kids you taught?
A: All the time.
Q: What effects do you see in them from their time in the wilderness program?
A: They care about each other. All these kids got jobs. I took a gang, east side Daly City gang. They all got jobs, some of them got businesses, some of them got kids, and they worry about them like everybody else. What really worked was putting those kids in an environment where they had to talk to each other, and sit around a fire, and just talk about who are you what are you, where did you come from. It was about respect, real deep respect. It was about just getting them brave enough to get up and talk from their soul.
Reno Taini
Education: Biology degree and master’s in education from San Francisco State University
Age: 84
Lives in: Woodside
Family situation: Married, no children
Five things about Reno Taini:
1. Loves to hunt edible mushrooms
2. Flyfishes, and likes to feed insects to trout
3. Owns one of Gen. George S. Patton’s Second World War jeeps.
4. Favorite books involve unexplained mysteries, like The Lost City of Z
5. Makes Italian grappa brandy from his home-grown grapes