The Life of Don Gustafson
Aug. 26–Don Gustafson, who died Aug. 19 at age 67, spent 30 years as a Jefferson County Public Schools teacher, where fifth- and sixth- grade students chuckled at his gleefully hokey jokes.
He spent all of his life in Denver except for five years, when his father, a railroad employee named Swede Gustafson, moved his son and wife to Leadville, where the small family lived in the company depot. Later, when Leadville reinvented the depot as a tourist attraction, Gustafson gaped at the transformation of the place where he spent many cold winter evenings.
He married another Jeffco teacher, Ana Garcia, who went on to work for Denver Public Schools before she retired recently. She loved his incessant jokes and laughed every time he told waiters the jape he saved for restaurants.
“Why don’t cannibals eat clowns?” he always asked. (“Because they taste funny.”) Countless students groaned affectionately at his wordplay gags about the blind carpenter announcing “I see” as he picked up his hammer and saw, or the toothless termite who went into a saloon and asked, “Is the bar tender here?” Students liked Gustafson, whom they knew as Mr. G. He never talked down to them and had an almost preternatural gift for teaching math.
“I never understood math until I had you, and then math was easy,” students said when they encountered Gustafson, often years after graduating from his class.
The comment was so inevitable whenever the Gustafsons encountered former students that Ana Garcia Gustafson learned to listen for it.
“And the other comment they almost always said, even when they were grown up, had families or were going to college, was ‘Mr. G., you made us feel so smart,’ ” she recounted.
“It made my heart sing. I’d wait for it and pinch him when that comment came. And, of course, everyone said that if you knew one thing about Don, it was him and his corny jokes.” Gustafson was telling jokes even as he became drowsy from the anesthetic preparing him for open-heart surgery last month. His final words were a darkly funny wisecrack. As Gustafson made his way to a post-surgery shower, his hospital roommate said, “Oh, Don, that shower’s gonna make you feel like a million bucks!”"I hope so,” he replied, “because right now I feel like $1.49.” Five minutes later, he collapsed from a pulmonary embolism. He died two days later.
A service will be at 3 p.m. Sunday at Presbyterian Church of the Covenant, 5400 S. Yosemite St., Greenwood Village.
Besides his wife, survivors include his mother, Dorothy Gustafson, and a daughter, Turi Gustafson, both of Denver.
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