While visiting my mother recently in Spokane, Wash., I enjoyed a brief reunion with my fifth-grade teacher.

We each enjoyed trading memories and stories that afternoon in the living room and kitchen of a comfortable home that Bruce Anthony, now 78, shares with his wife of 45 years, the former Sharon Larson.

Not only was Mr. Anthony my first male teacher, the 27 students in my class (1962-’63) were the first he would encounter in 31 years of teaching, he noted. Mr. Anthony spent 30 of those years working in Spokane School District 81, retiring in 1993, the same year he was named Spokane’s “Teacher of the Year.”

During the 1966-’67 school year, the same year he and Sharon married, they each taught in the Highline School District in Seattle. The couple returned to Spokane in 1967 where they raised their family of five children, two girls and three boys. Today, the Anthony family also includes eight grandchildren — four boys and four girls.

Mr. Anthony taught four years at Logan Elementary School in Spokane before moving briefly to Seattle. Upon returning to Spokane, he taught for seven years at Garfield Elementary and finished his career with 18 years at Audubon Elementary.

A former gunnery officer with the U.S. Navy, Mr. Anthony served from 1956-’57 aboard a seaplane tender in the north Pacific. He initially trained as a student of architecture for three years at Washington State University from 1951-’55 before switching his major and receiving his under-graduate degree in general studies. Following his Navy experience, Mr. Anthony attended Eastern Washington State College to obtain a teaching degree. It was an experience while attending Navy Boot Camp in San Diego that convinced Mr. Anthony to be a teacher, he said.

“One of the young men in my platoon was Billy Smith, an overweight black draftee from Mississippi. We met shortly after mail call when he asked me to read him a letter he had just received from his mother. He could not read or write and he faced washing out from boot camp, so I taught him to read for an hour a night during those nine weeks of boot camp,” Mr. Anthony recounted.

“That experience made me so happy. It showed me that teaching was something that I wanted to do,” he said.

During his time aboard ship, Mr. Anthony was based in Yakuska, Japan, although his ship did spend two months in Hong Kong and stopped briefly in Guam and the Philippines at Subic Bay, a U.S. Naval base, before heading up to Adak, part of the Aleutian chain of islands off Alaska, before heading to a seaplane refueling station in the Pascadores, between China and Hawaii.

Upon returning stateside, Mr. Anthony was stationed at Moffett Field in Mountain View, Calif., where he was the catcher on a baseball team. He spent his time off duty working at a J.C. Penney’s store in Mountain View.

My visit with Mr. Anthony brought back many names of fellow students, most of whom I had forgotten. He, of course, remembered many of us vividly.

“I remember the students in that class in particular because it was my first year of teaching and all of you made a big impression on me,” he said.

As an extra duty each morning before teaching his own class, school principal Mrs. Cheney asked Mr. Anthony to supervise the bathing and cleaning up of a young boy who slept with his dog in a coal bin each night because the boy’s mother refused to allow the dog into the house.

“As you can imagine, he arrived at school each morning covered with coal dust. I would take him down to the showers off the school gym where we would get as much of the soot off his skin and clothes before school started at 9 a.m. But I could never get his underwear or socks clean. I think he only had one pair of each. So every week for that school year, I would buy him a fresh pair of underwear and a new pair of socks,” Mr. Anthony said.

Among the thousands of other students he encountered during 31 years teaching, Mr. Anthony counts Matthew Hannon, now 43, as one of his success stories.

“He was exceptionally bright and received an A on nearly every test and assignment,” Mr. Anthony remembers. “When he graduated from high school, I talked his parents into applying at four-year universities. They thought all they could afford was a few years at Spokane Community College. Much to their surprise, their son received a full-ride scholarship to John Hopkins University and is now a medical doctor. He even came to my retirement party.”

My strongest memory of Mr. Anthony was of him standing in front of the class or out on the playground in a sharply-tailored Navy blue or black suit, white shirt and a dark necktie. His shoes were always polished to a spit shine and he always stood ramrod straight.

He was our captain on the rough and tumble seas of academia. Although it was his first year of teaching, Mr. Anthony never had to bark orders when telling us what to do or not to do. Whenever he said something, we knew that he meant it. Upon my departure, I took a few moments to admire a number of Mr. Anthony’s paintings — both oils and watercolors — that he and Sharon had framed and displayed around their home.

“Painting in the winter and gardening during the summer are my hobbies now,” he said with just a hint of pride in his own accomplishments.