Carmendale Fernandes, a teacher of speech and debate and drama at Fremont High School in Sunnyvale for 42 years, died Oct. 15. She was 90.
“Miss F,” as she was affectionately known by her students, taught at Fremont High from 1946 through 1988. She was known nationally for shaping numerous FHS speech stars.
Fernandes was selected as one of the original 10 members of the National Speech and Debate Association Hall of Fame, and was elected the association’s first and only female board president in 1978. She was also a member of the Hall of Fame in the California High School Speech Association.
Former student and Fremont High Class of 1969 alum Mark Utley recalled a common exercise of Carmendale’s in which students would be given a slip of paper with three choices of topics to chose from and only two minutes to prepare a five-minute speech.
“She taught her students to be organized, to be prepared and to be conscious of their presentations,” Utley said. “She was not by any means a softy or a pushover.”
As a result, Utley said, many of her students quickly sharpened their skills, eventually building successful careers as congressmen, city council members, TV newscasters and lawyers.
“She attracted the best and the brightest and, as a general rule, produced people who built upon those raw skills and matured into a very successful life,” said Utley, who is the associate general counsel of Fujitsu America, Inc. in Sunnyvale.
Ken Law, a student of Camendale’s in the early 1970s, said she was a selfless mentor whose reach went across the country.
“She took young kids and molded them into adults way before their time,” said Law, a local attorney. “By the time you graduated from high school, most people thought of you as a polished adult. Her training went way beyond speech and debate.”
Law said Fernandes would make sure students had the finances to attend speech tournaments and would ensure her students went to good colleges, going as far as helping them get scholarships.
Although she was relatively small in stature at 5-foot-2, she was known as a powerhouse who could command a room. One of her greatest pleasures in life was a nice chat about politics and a well-aged scotch.
“I’m going to miss our conversations,” Law said. “She was a fascinating person to talk to, and I hope when I’m 90 to still have my wits about me the way she did.”
Just this past August, Utley, Law and other former students from throughout the nation gathered in Palo Alto to celebrate Fernandes’ 90th birthday. The current FHS speech and debate team, along with their advisers, joined the celebration, met the “legend” as they called her, and even participated in an impromptu debate with former Fremont debaters.
“One would be so lucky in their lifetime to have known a person like Carmendale Fernandes,” said Michelle Law, Ken Law’s wife and a former English student of Fernandes’. “As a teacher and speech coach, she was like a Halley’s Comet experience. Her accomplishments and widespread influence on people’s lives reached a rare, not often seen level of greatness. And I am not exaggerating; hers was a life well-lived.”
Fernandes is survived by her sister, Adelia Bettencourt-Banzhof, and predeceased by her brother, Robert J. Fernandes.
The family requests donations in lieu of flowers be made to the Carmendale Fernandes Memorial Fund in care of the National Speech and Debate Association at speechanddebate.org/carmendale.
