Dr. David Baker wasn’t always the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recipient. Before the professor of biochemistry and his team at the UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design starting building entirely new kinds of proteins, David was a student at Montlake Elementary.
“It was just a happy time,” recalls David’s mother Marcia Baker.
Marcia and her husband Marshall were both professors at the University of Washington. They bought their home in Montlake in the early 1960s around the time David was born. They have lived in the neighborhood ever since. David started school at Montlake Elementary in 1967. His siblings were students at Montlake and then in the late 1990s and early 2000s David's own children attended the school.
“It meant so much to two generations of our family,” says Marcia.
David walked to Montlake each day with his neighborhood friends. In the 1967-68 school year, David had Mrs. Bain for kindergarten. Then in 1968-69 his teacher was Miss Izuo for first grade. In second grade his parents took a sabbatical and moved the family for a year to Russia.
In class in a soviet school in Moscow in the early 1970s, Marcia says despite not speaking Russian David still excelled.
Marcia remembers the teacher telling the other Russian students, “Why don’t you do it like he [David] does it?”
The family returned to Montlake and David went on to play chess and then soccer at the Montlake Community Center.
“He was a big reader,” says Marcia. “I think he enjoyed everything.”
David also attended what was at the time Meany Junior High School and then Garfield for High School.
Looking back there’s a family legend that may have portended David’s future success in math and science. Marcia says David developed at a different pace when he was younger. She says he didn’t speak much in the years before school started.
“Now we think he was just thinking!”
At the age of four David told a friend’s dad that “zero is a funny number.”
“That story remained in our family for a long time,” says Marcia.
The Baker family remembers voting at Montlake School when Washington still had physical polling places.
Marcia also remembers volunteering at the school.
“They had some unruly kids in fifth grade and they thought wisely that maybe they were bored and so they wanted to give them a little something extra.” So Marcia, an atmospheric science professor at UW, volunteered to teach an advanced math group at school.
Today Marcia and Marshall are still in their Montlake home. They still visit Jay’s Dry Cleaners. They still connect with longtime friends and neighbors. They’ve watched closely as the old Montlake building has undergone its massive rebuilding project.
Attending Montlake was such a good experience for their family they wish more neighborhood families would do so.
“I can’t understand why everyone doesn’t choose that path,” says Marcia.
For her son, it was a path that started at Montlake and lead to the Nobel Prize.
“I wish everyone would choose it”
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