Mike Stokes, who taught and coached at Ransom Everglades for 48 years, dies at 81
In an award-winning Miami Herald essay, a 17-year-old Michael “Mike” Henry Stokes, a senior at Miami Senior High School, pondered his career options. That January 1958 essay was deemed the best entry out of 20,000 in the Herald’s 14th annual essay contest.
Humanity seems to be rushing headlong toward chaos and youth must rally its forces to prevent this from happening. What vocation will best train me to meet this challenge?
After posing the question, Stokes — who died Tuesday at his Miami home at 81 of natural causes, according to Ransom Everglades’ Head of School Penny Townsend — decided in his essay to link science and religion.
Believing as I do, there is only one answer for me: Along with science, I would like to study for the ministry. I would like to study deeply enough in science to find out why there is a general loss of faith, regardless of religious background, among the top scientists of the world.
Is it not possible that their loss of faith could be causing some of the world’s general unrest? If the widening gulf between science and religion could be spanned, might not half the battle for peace be won?
Stokes’ Ransom history
Stokes found his ministry in the students at Ransom Everglades in Coconut Grove for 48 years until his retirement in 2010.
“His impact on our school was outsized,” Townsend wrote in a letter to the Ransom Everglades community on Wednesday. She affectionately referred to Stokes as a “triple threat” because he “fully engaged in academics, athletics and student life” and would “frequently drive students home after practices when they needed rides.”
Generations of alumni and colleagues, quite literally, worshiped this teacher and coach.
Stokes joined the private institution when it was Ransom School for Boys in 1962. He was a social studies department chair, taught history and economics and founded the outdoor experiential learning program that turned into the Outward Bound experience for ninth graders. He coached boys football and girls basketball, after the school merged with Everglades School for Girls in 1974.
Stokes also coached track and field and soccer and, as athletic director, helped found Ransom Everglades’ Athletics Hall of Fame. He was the summer camp and summer school director. He helped create Ransom’s current Bay Studies curriculum for freshmen.
Stokes — described in 1958 as a “sturdy, serious boy,” by the Herald — even lived on the school’s grounds in a cottage when it was a boarding school. There, in that bungalow, he and then-wife Judith Penny Stokes, with whom he stayed close, raised their daughter Michele.
He often opened his family home on campus to students who sometimes needed a place to crash.
One of these students is former Miami Herald reporter Patty Shillington, Ransom Everglades Class of 1977.
“He’s like a father to me,” Shillington said in an email to the Herald.
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“As our basketball and track coach, Mike Stokes taught us many things — and he endured many things, including a punch to his gut from my fist during one particularly heated basketball game,” Shillington wrote in tribute to Stokes. “I came up from a hard collision swinging at an opposing player and, very lucky for me, he ran out on the court and got in the way. And what was his reaction, doubled-over, as he tried to catch his breath? Not anger. Not disappointment. But concern for what was bothering me if I could get so worked up about a game.
“This true tale is a metaphor for Mike’s role in my life, then and now, more than three decades later,” Shillington wrote. “With gentle guidance and high expectations, he pushed me to be my best. Like a good godparent, he has always been on my side, willing to give me the benefit of the doubt – or throw me a disapproving glare. He always seemed to know what I — and countless other young people — needed. I’m old enough now to know that this kind of relationship is a rare commodity in one’s life — and something I will always cherish.”
Miami born educator
Stokes was born in Miami on July 6, 1940, to Kermit and Beatrice Stokes. At Miami High, he joined the ROTC and scored a scholarship to the University of Miami.
Former Miami Herald religion columnist Adon Taft, in his column on Jan. 18, 1958, praised the 17-year-old Stokes as “a Miami high school boy [who] has stepped out where adults, apparently, have feared to tread. And with his courage he has displayed a wisdom much needed in the tense area where churches and science seemingly have squared off in disdain.”
At the time, Stokes cited as inspiration the 1955 drama, “A Man Called Peter,” a film about a Washington preacher who served as chaplain of the United States Senate.
As a senior, he also championed education and told the Miami Herald in 1958 that Dade County public schools were just fine. “You get as much out of school as you put into it,” he had said.
But he also made sure to put that same effort into his students — his ministry.
“He was never afraid to try something new — the perfect messenger for so many of us, with the perfect message: try earnestly, think deeply and never stop learning,” Class of ‘77 student Catherine Holshouser shared in Shillington’s essay.
“He introduced me to Dave Barry, Carl Hiaasen, government and law. I owe him so much for everything that I have learned,” Class of ‘88’s Heidi Howard Tandy, a partner at Miami business law firm Berger Singerman, wrote on Facebook.
During retirement last November, Stokes told the school in a faculty emeritus newsletter that he missed being in the classroom. He was proud of the weeklong Outward Bound rite-of-passage wilderness program in the Everglades for ninth graders he had developed.
“Most of the things kids learn in school are for a grade and they don’t really matter,” Stokes said in a 1985 Miami Herald article about the program. Alone in the Everglades, he saw a life lesson worth delivering. “If you burn breakfast, it matters. If you get lost, it matters. There is a real consequence to every action.”
Family memories
Stokes’ teachings extended to a grateful family, which includes his daughter, Michele “Mikki” Stokes Feinberg, her husband Lee Feinberg, who took care of Stokes as his health declined, and his grandkids Sophie and Jacob Feinberg.
“To my brother and I, he was Papa. Papa is a huge reason why I love words and stories. He encouraged our passions,” said granddaughter Sophie Feinberg, a journalism graduate from the University of Florida. “We had contracts, where for every book we read after learning to read, he would supply a new one. I remember reading ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ together, our own book club, and watching the movie.
“He always shared his New York Times with me or other clippings he found,” she added. “He was an amazing teacher, and that extended to his grandchildren. He was always eager to help us understand an assignment or share a book from his overflowing shelves. His voice was gruff, like a bear, but a teddy bear. His hugs were the same.”
Donations in memoriam
Services will be private. Donations may be made in Stokes’ memory to Temple Judea’s Margaux Early Childhood School Fund or the Michael Stokes Outward Bound Endowment Fund at Ransom Everglades.
This story was originally published September 16, 2021 at 4:17 PM.
