Stephen Oxenrider, a beloved former Arlington Public Schools teacher, passed away on Tuesday, Aug. 12, after nearly two years of battling pancreatic cancer. He was 73.
Oxenrider taught English as a Second Language (ESL) for 35 years in Arlington, beginning at Kenmore Middle School before transferring to Swanson Middle School, where he stayed until retiring in 2007, per his obituary.
Following his passing, Oxenrider’s social media was flooded with tributes from friends, family and colleagues. Among the most heartfelt were those from former students, who over nearly three decades had come to know him as a “role model,” “mentor” and “friend.”
“Steve was one of the great ones,” Fernando Torrez, one of Oxenrider’s former students, said in a Facebook post. “It is because of his passion and patience in teaching ESL, I never gave up, many of us never gave up. He was one of the important pillars in our middle school years.”
Born on March 5, 1950, in Millersburg, Pa., Oxenrider graduated from Millersburg Area High School in 1968. He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in education from Bloomsburg State University in 1972 and a master’s degree in ESL from Temple University in 1978.
Oxenrider briefly lived near Honey Brook and Manheim, Pa., before teaching Spanish and ESL at New Holland High School. In 1975, he relocated to Northern Virginia, settling in Lake Ridge, where he taught ESL at Sleepy Hollow Elementary School in Fairfax County before coming to work for APS.
In 1998, Arlington Public Schools named him Teacher of the Year, marking the first time an ESL teacher received the honor. After retiring, Oxenrider volunteered at the Arlington Career Center. He married his longtime companion, Tom Jones, on Jan. 6, 2010.
Oxenrider’s friends and colleagues described him as kind, genuine, patient, passionate and funny.
Felicia Koppelman Meier, a retired ESL teacher from Swanson Middle School who worked with Oxenrider since the 1990s, fondly recalled her colleague as a “really special man” with a great sense of humor who had a profound impact on many lives, especially those of his students.
“He is one of those exceptional human beings who, deep down in his soul, just touched everybody,” she told ARLnow. “I mean, it’s unbelievable. Every time I open Facebook there’s like nine more tributes from all over the world. There’s… a student from Indonesia who messaged me, and then wrote this really long post about how her whole family just loved him.”
Torrez, who attended Swanson Middle School in the early 1990s after immigrating from Bolivia, described Oxenrider as a transformational figure in his youth. Oxenrider, fluent in Spanish, took a special interest in Torrez and other immigrant students, teaching them about American culture and guiding them toward success.
“He would sometimes talk to us about what’s going to happen once you learn English, or once you finish middle school. ‘Are you going to college?’ How to help your parents,” Torrez told ARLnow. “So, it wasn’t just about school… He truly cared for your understanding of what it is, in my opinion, to be an American.”
Apart from teaching, Oxenrider enjoyed rollercoasters and was an avid traveler, visiting over 80 countries throughout his lifetime.
But his most celebrated hobby was undoubtedly his enthusiasm for James Bond films.
Fox Business reported that Oxenrider had collected over 30,000 James Bond-related memorabilia. His long-time friend, Bernard Vandendriessche, claims the collection was “unquestionably” the largest collection of such collectibles, specifically autographs, in the world.
“Beginning October 1962 he started collecting [autographs]… when all those actors were still alive,” Vandendriessche, a fellow James Bond collector, told ARLnow. “He had the chance to meet them and to write them, especially to write them and to in the 60s… and he had contacts worldwide with all the people who were involved in the James Bond movies.”
In March, Oxenrider sold off the remaining pieces of his collection, which an auction house estimated to be worth up to $1.3 million.
Vandendriessche noted that Oxenrider was not only beloved by his students, friends and family but also by James Bond fans around the world.
“The whole James Bond community was posting on Facebook. It was very strange because you have a lot of communities in James Bond world… from Japan to Germany, to Austria, to Switzerland, to the UK to France,” he said. “So everyone is paying tribute to him, and that’s when you have to imagine the influence he had on the whole James Bond circus. He was a very important person.”
Photo via Steve Oxenrider/Facebook
