Emily Forschen
She was born Jean MacPherson, but her name underwent a few changes throughout the years. As did she.
She holds a master’s degree in nursing from San Francisco State University and boasts a controversial career in the California State Assembly. She retired in 1988 and is now living in California, enjoying her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Her legal name now? Jean Moorhead Duffy.
She is where you must begin to understand the man that is Stuart McElderry. That means, since he is Dean of Arts and Humanities, she is in essence helping shape the school’s largest department.
McElderry operates with a calm temperament. His humor favors witty quips over obvious jokes. While professionally visible and present, and popular, personally he is private, even mysterious, just how he likes it. He is approachable and well-liked by students and his coworkers. His poised demeanor makes it feel as if he’s known his whole life that he’d be exactly where he is now.
But the assuredness McElderry displays doesn’t match the unique, improbable path he’s taken to his deanship at Las Positas — from popular history professor to school administrator. And his collectedness doesn’t prevent him from standing out. The box to fit him does not exist.
Coincidentally, who he is now might be a direct reflection of his unconventional upbringing.
Which brings Duffy to the forefront.
McElderry is her oldest of five children, a quintet that includes Janet, Robert and Glenn McElderry, and Lorna Moorhead. She married Ernest McElderry, a middle school teacher and principal, in 1960. Their first child came five years later. He was born in San Jose but he and his siblings spent their childhood in Auburn, Calif., which is a registered California Historical Landmark. It sits between Virginiatown and Georgetown, about a two hour drive north from Livermore.
Their childhood in these remote mountains of Northern California did not include a television, or next-door neighbors. Their daily chores included milking goats, feeding animals — chickens, rabbit, pigs, horses, goats and geese.
“Was that unique? I don’t know,” McElderry said, flaunting his signature tongue-in-cheek humor.
“No cell phones in those days. Yet, we somehow survived.”
McElderry was, as his mother put it, “a bright little boy.” She told of his vivid imagination that consumed hours in the mornings coming up with stories and illustrating them. He had lots of room to let his creativity flourish, his unplugged environment, and all.
But the simplicity of their Little House on the Prairie existence wouldn’t last always.
In 1970, she left a thriving nursing career in Santa Clara County to become a teacher at Sacramento State.
In 1971, she completed her master’s
degree at San Jose State, adding to the associate’s degree she had from Cal Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree from Stanford.
In 1974, she got remarried, this time to George Moorhead.
In 1978, she ran for the California
State Assembly as a Republican named Jean Moorhead. She won the seat, flipping her career on its head and changing life as it was known for her family. She was the first nurse ever elected to state legislature.
McElderry, who was 13 when his mother entered politics, described that stage of their lives as educational, sometimes hectic and a little on the glamorous side at times. But he did learn the functions of the state government earlier than most.
“It was hectic because my mom was always busy, always campaigning it seemed,” he said. “I learned early that once an election is won, it’s time to get ready for the next one.”
Sports were a big part of the McElderry kids’ lives. Regardless of the season, the four of them were involved in some kind of sport. When they weren’t playing them, they were watching sports on TV — yes, they had access to a TV now — or attending games.
Baseball was his first love. Football didn’t come into the picture until his freshman year of high school.
More on that in just a second.
“Public service is very tough on families,” his mom said. “(It caused) me to miss school events and sports activities.”
In 1981, only three years into her political career, Duffy changed parties. Switching from Republican to Democrat mid-term was unheard of made campaigning increasingly difficult.
The work she and her family put into campaigning paid off, and she was re-elected the next year. She was the first in 22 years at the time to flip while in office. Her popularity was never higher, but that also included disapproval. Many constituents were angry they elected a Republican who flipped.
This all happened while McElderry was in high school.
“I’m very proud of her,” he said, “for doing what she felt was right no matter what others thought about it. She is a very strong woman. I remember it made a lot of people angry. … Who switches political parties while in office? It was a bold move, one that she clearly had strong conviction about.”
McElderry holds great esteem for his mom’s bold career choices. He calls her an “unheralded hero of the feminist movement” as she taught him a live lesson about gender equality.
She stayed the representative of the fifth Assembly district until she decided not to run again in 1984, the year he graduated from Placer High School.
She was succeeded by Tim Leslie, a Republican.
In 1985, his mom remarried again, this time to Gordon Duffy. He was a Democrat in the Assembly and someone she came in contact with often after leaving Sacramento State to work for the California Nursing Association. She ended her political career when they wed. She continued as a professional public speaker for a few years until she ultimately retired in 1988.
The buoy of McElderry’s life during those eventful political years was sports.
He quit baseball in high school and
played football all four years at Placer, which was a powerhouse in his day. Because of his academic success and football skills, he was offered two fullride scholarships: one to Stanford and one to Cal Berkeley.
The rivaling schools competing for McElderry’s talent didn’t just happen in mailboxes and recruitment meetings. The vying happened in his home, too. His dad wanted him to be a Golden Bear, His mother, a Stanford graduate, wanted him to be a Cardinal.
“I chose Cal because I grew up a Cal Bears fan,” he said. He recalled his dad taking him and his siblings to the games– “back when football was always played on glorious Sunday afternoons”– and listening to them on the radio.
McElderry played left tackle for Cal all four years of college. But it wasn’t his driving force. It wasn’t even his pas sion.
A filmmaker, that’s was what he wanted to be. He nearly walked away from his scholarship at Cal after his freshman year to go study film at UCLA.
Ultimately, he was talked into staying.
He was a history major and spent most of his snaps blocking for quarterback Troy Taylor and running back Darryl Ingram. Many of his teammates went pro, such as Ingram. While McElderry didn’t quite cut it for the NFL, he had other things in mind anyway.
“I was looking forward to graduate school,” he said.
McElderry graduated with his bachelor’s degree in 1989 and got his master’s degree in history from San Francisco State a few years later, taking time to go teach English in Spain for two summers. By 1998, he had finished his doctoral degree at the University of Oregon.
After graduating with his Ph.D., he started. The search for jobs at four-year institutions can be narrow, so he took the first opportunity offered to him. It took him out to Doane College, a small liberal arts college in Crete, Neb. It didn’t last long, though.
“It wasn’t long before we were so isolated,” he described. “I wasn’t terribly fond of being in Nebraska. Don’t get me wrong, the people there were great and the land has its own beauty, but I was too far from family, friends and familiar surroundings.”
Two years later, he found himself contemplating Santa Rosa Junior College and Las Positas. The history position was offered to him at Las Positas one week
before SRJC would have made their final decision, so he took it. He was hired and moved back to California almost 19 years ago. He had found his way back home.
McElderry said he loved the community feel of LPC, the collegiality and warmth. The relatively modest size of the campus definitely helped. He became a popular teacher quickly.
“He truly works from a student and staff-centered approach,” said Titian Lish, Theater Arts Department Coordinator. “He goes to bat for us, but is also a god at reading the room and knowing when to take a different approach.”
On the popular website Rate My Professor, McElderry is the most reviewed professor in the school. He’s maintaining a 4.5 out of five overall score — and he hasn’t even been in the classroom in a full
academic year.
branched into the other story ideas that excite him.
In the novel, a university professor named Lee Tomlinson gets a confidential file slipped to him while he’s in Moscow, researching for his debut novel. The file leads the character on an all-out investigation into the Nazi Germany regime, an espionage novel that questions the widely accepted fall of the administration.
The important part to McElderry was that the character of Tomlinson wasn’t an Indiana Jones or Robert Langdon– he was reluctant, sort of an anti-hero.
“This book is a movie inside my head,” he enthusiastically said. His process is that of a pure creative, a passionate writer or maybe even someone who might have at once point wanted to be a filmmaker.
It’s fitting that in his office, the poster for his novel is next to a Casablanca poster – a movie he describes as possibly perfect.
He prefers to write off the cuff, saying that planning stifles the storytelling process. This was something that he said didn’t happen in his sequel writing. With “The Barcelona File,” McElderry said that he “just dove in and let (the story) tell itself.” The novel took him four years to complete.
In 2014 and 2015, McElderry took the fall semesters off on sabbatical leave to research and write a sequel, which he says is still just a draft for now.
“It’s on the way back burner,” he confessed.
He has another novel in the works as well, titled “A String of Pearls,” but he says he hasn’t worked on either book in over two years. He didn’t quite have the answer that the reviewers begging for a sequel on Amazon were looking for.
“I will probably get back to writing again but I don’t know when. Maybe when I retire in a decade or so.”
It’s worth nothing that writing books seems to be a family activity– his mother and his sister both have released books of their own. His mother has written and published a book about public health, while his sister Lorna, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, has written two humorous nonfiction books about dealing with the disease.
For now, McElderry is content, even happy where he is. Throughout his life, he’s been an all-star football player, a politician’s son (who still has a relationship with his parents), a novelist, an artist (he illustrated his mother’s book), a well-respected teacher and a dean. His business-type dress shirts often cover his tattooed arms, an ichthus (the fish used to represent his Christian faith) being the most meaningful to him.
No one can quite put him in any box because he doesn’t belong in any of them– something he’s totally fine with.
“The only person who knows me better than I know myself is God,” he said. “My wife is a close second.”
of his new position. He was the interim dean of his department since the spring of 2018 before getting hired for the permanent position in the fall of the same year.
“The difference between being a dean and an instructor is largely one of scale,” he’s determined. “As an instructor, my work primarily impacted only the students in my classes. As a dean, my work– although less directly– impacts many more students in many more classes.”
The transition to the dean’s office wasn’t seamless. The pressure and pace of administration nearly got to him. He said at first he was so overwhelmed with everything involved that he almost went back to teaching, but learned to pace himself and the value of balancing the work. Now, he’s happy working in an area where he feels he can work with curriculum and both faculty and students.
He still misses some things about teaching. Telling stories. Those precious moments when the light comes on in a students’ eyes.
McElderry, a gifted storyteller from childhood, didn’t just stop at telling stories in his classroom. In 2012, he self-published a novel titled “The Barcelona File,” which averages five stars in Amazon reviews.
It’s easy to tell that he misses the novel cycle. When talking about “The Barcelona File” process, he quickly branched into the other story ideas that excite him.
In the novel, a university professor named Lee Tomlinson gets a confidential file slipped to him while he’s in Moscow, researching for his debut novel. The file leads the character on an all-out investigation into the Nazi Germany regime, an espionage novel that questions the widely accepted fall of the administration.
The important part to McElderry was that the character of Tomlinson wasn’t an Indiana Jones or Robert Langdon– he was reluctant, sort of an anti-hero.
“This book is a movie inside my head,” he enthusiastically said. His process is that of a pure creative, a passionate writer or maybe even someone who might have at once point wanted to be a filmmaker.
It’s fitting that in his office, the poster for his novel is next to a Casablanca poster – a movie he describes as possibly perfect.
He prefers to write off the cuff, saying that planning stifles the storytelling process. This was something that he said didn’t happen in his sequel writing. With “The Barcelona File,” McElderry said that he “just dove in and let (the story) tell itself.” The novel took him four years to complete.
In 2014 and 2015, McElderry took the fall semesters off on sabbatical leave to research and write a sequel, which he says is still just a draft for now.
“It’s on the way back burner,” he confessed.
He has another novel in the works as well, titled “A String of Pearls,” but he says he hasn’t worked on either book in over two years. He didn’t quite have the answer that the reviewers begging for a sequel on Amazon were looking for.
“I will probably get back to writing again but I don’t know when. Maybe when I retire in a decade or so.”
It’s worth nothing that writing books seems to be a family activity– his mother and his sister both have released books of their own. His mother has written and published a book about public health, while his sister Lorna, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, has written two humorous nonfiction books about dealing with the disease.
For now, McElderry is content, even happy where he is. Throughout his life, he’s been an all-star football player, a politician’s son (who still has a relationship with his parents), a novelist, an artist (he illustrated his mother’s book), a well-respected teacher and a dean. His business-type dress shirts often cover his tattooed arms, an ichthus (the fish used to represent his Christian faith) being the most meaningful to him.
No one can quite put him in any box because he doesn’t belong in any of them– something he’s totally fine with.
“The only person who knows me better than I know myself is God,” he said. “My wife is a close second.”
