In his office at St. Cloud’s Tech High School, Charles Sell enjoyed a telephone conversation with a man just a couple of weeks before the man shot his wife and killed himself.
Charles Sell was the principal at Tech High School. The man on the other end of the line was actor Gig Young. The murder-suicide happened in the couple’s Manhattan apartment on Oct. 19, 1978.
Last week, I wrote a column about Gig Young, born as Byron Barr in 1913 in St. Cloud and an alumnus of Tech High School.
Sell, now a resident of Country Manor in Sartell, read that column and decided to call me. What a blast from the past. Instantly, I recognized his voice after more than half a century. He had been assistant principal when I was a student at Tech in the mid-1960s.
Sell told me the Oscar-winning Gig Young had been invited in 1978 by Tech High School to be grand marshal for a school parade.
One day, Sell’s secretary told him Gig Young was on the line. Surprised, Sell picked up, said hello. Young expressed his thanks for being invited and offered his regrets about not being able to show up for the parade. Then the actor talked on about his happy times in St. Cloud and his fond memories of Tech. He reminisced about a Tech speech teacher, the great Myrtle Bacon, whom he much admired. He asked Sell if the long-abandoned pickle-canning factory was still there, the one owned by Young’s father and where Young had worked as a teenager once upon a time. Sell told him it had been torn down when South Junior High School was built in 1960.
“We had a very nice conversation,” said Sell said.
About two weeks later, Sell picked up a newspaper. Shock and horror hit him when he saw the headline: “Actor Gig Young kills wife, shoots self.” The sudden shock of it still lingers in Sell’s mind.
Sell was Tech principal from 1969 until 1983. So many of the people I’ve interviewed for news stories in the past 25 years mentioned they attended Tech and remember Chuck Sell.
They might appreciate a Sell update. Born in Mayer, a small town near Waconia, Sell graduated from Waconia High School. When he was hired by Tech in 1956, he started as an American-history teacher and football coach. He’s also been a world traveler, an avid outdoorsman and a private pilot.
“I gave up flying when I turned 90,” he said. Now, self-grounded, he still enjoys golf.
“I used to hunt and fish, but golf is good because I can still do it,”
Sell and his late wife, Catherine, have three children (two girls, one boy), many grandchildren and even 10 great-grandchildren.
When Catherine became ill with Alzheimer’s disease, she and Charles moved into an assisted-care apartment at Country Manor. After his wife passed, he decided to stay in the apartment. There are quite a number of former Tech teachers living at Country Manor, and Sell often shoots the breeze with them. And in an extraordinary coincidence, there are even three people living there who grew up in Sell’s boyhood hometown when it held only 125 people.
I told Sell he had given me a good talking-to way back when. One day, he called me into his office and asked why I was skipping school so often in my senior year. I told him I’d take loads of books home from the library and skip school to read them all day. Then I told him I get excellent grades, do my homework on time and even get my stories and columns to the school newspaper before deadlines. He frowned and gave me a stern talk about why attendance is important.
That must be the reason I so vividly remembered the sound of his voice when he called last week.
