Friday, April 15, 2011

Teacher loses hair wager with winning auction

Iditarod musher’s eight-year beard tamed for school


By MATT FURBER
Express Staff Writer

Making a clean cut for the Community School, fourth-grade teacher Trent Herbst, a five-time Iditarod competitor, loses his beard Monday after a school auction surpasses goals.

Trent Herbst has been teaching fourth grade at the Community School each of the five years he has been competing in the annual Iditarod dogsled race from Anchorage to Nome, Alaska. On March 10, the day before the Community School Auction, Herbst sped with his dog team into the ghost town of Iditarod, the halfway point in the 2011 race.

"He was in first," said Maria Gerhardt, an auction organizer and mother of two Community School students.

Gerhardt said excitement at the school about the beloved teacher's success has been infectious. However, Herbst's dog-sledding prowess led to the ultimate demise of his eight-year-old beard Monday—payment for a lost wager by Ketchum's winningest dog musher.

"The following day we had the auction," Gerhardt said. "Trent said if we reached $50,000 he would shave off his beard. We raised $85,000."

The fever of Herbst's dog-sledding success infused the March 11 auction, Gerhardt said.

"Everyone was so energetic. People opened their hearts out."

They also opened their pocketbooks. At the auction dinner, held for 172 people in the Sun Valley Inn Limelight Room, the $85,000 "paddle-up" for the school's general fund, together with silent and live auctions, raised $235,000 for the school, the most ever raised at the auction, Gerhardt said.

Herbst, whose previous Iditarod best was 48th, finished 24th in Nome. Spring break followed for the school community, but at an assembly in the school theater Monday, a full house gathered to witness Herbst's marathon trimming, performed by Vertu Hair Salon stylist Annette Farnham, the mother of former Community School student Sam Farnham.

"The whole school was invited to the theater," Gerhardt said. "The first comment he made was, 'It's cold.""

It was the first time Herbst's 8-year-old daughter had seen her father's face. A video made by drama director Tom Nash titled "The Man Who Dared To Grow Hair" was shown at the beard trimming and ended with fourth-graders chanting "Shave it! Shave it!"

Will Herbst grow his beard again? Gerhardt said he will need to do so for the ice and snow of the Iditarod next year.

Perhaps the next auction theme will be "Iditarod" and include a beard contest. For now, students are worried that their clean-shaven teacher, known for hard love in the classroom, might get cranky without his beard and require more homework.

"He's so loved by everyone at the school," Gerhardt said.

Greg Foley: gfoley@mtexpress.com




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