Photography by Yuvie Styles
Professor Geoff Grimes performs magic for children and families who attend the annual three-night close-up magic showcase at Dallas College Mountain View Campus.
Grimes formed the Mark Wilson Magic Club at Mountain View, named in honor of the Sunset High School alumnus who had a TV magic show that Grimes and his sister used to watch every Sunday as kids growing up in the Houston area.
The club and the magic shows have brought joy to the campus for 24 years, but all this fun has roots in a dark place involving the Guatemalan Civil War and the murders of people he knew.
Grimes is the longest-tenured professor at Mountain View. He started teaching there in 1971, a year after it opened.
He’s taught freshman composition to three generations of kids from Oak Cliff and the suburbs, and he loves it.
“I’ve taught just about everything you could qualify with an English degree, but I really had a feeling for composition and working with students who are learning how to write,” he says.
He also taught the first dual-credit college course in Dallas ISD, a 6 a.m. “zero-hour” course, at Sunset High School in 1987, and he developed some of Dallas College’s earliest online courses in the ’90s.
Grimes’ ties to Guatemala began with the 1976 United States bicentennial. The City of DeSoto asked him to organize an art exchange with Guatemala City, which was also celebrating its 200th anniversary.
Art from children in DeSoto, where Grimes lives, and Mountain View students were sent to Guatemala.
Then a show of 100 “pictures” by children from all over Guatemala toured the U.S. and Guatemala for three years.
That began a lasting cultural exchange as well as a challenging life path for Grimes.
THE GUATEMALA CONNECTION
In 1980, Grimes participated in a conference in Guatemala City on how to start a community college district. There he met a journalist and literature professor, Rita Navarro, who had presented on non-credit courses.
A few months later, he found out Navarro had been murdered.
“She was shot 25 times by members of a paramilitary death squad, and my life went a different direction,” Grimes says.
The Guatemalan Civil War started in 1960, between the right-wing government of Guatemala, installed by a U.S.-backed coup d’état in 1958, and leftist rebel groups. Over 36 years of war resulted in as many as 200,000 deaths and 50,000 “disappearances.”
But Navarro’s death marked the first time that war crimes touched Grimes personally.
He began volunteering for a nonprofit helping Guatemalan refugees, and he served as president of its board for several years.
“We started organizing Guatemalan human rights conferences all over the Southwest, and we would bring up people who were under attack by the military, condemned as communists,” he says.
He became friends with a priest, Father Francisco Ortega, who left Guatemala under death threat. Ortega went to Washington, D.C., to consult on peace accords on behalf of four guerrilla commanders.
This was the mid-’90s, and Grimes bought the priest the computer he needed to do the work. The professor also printed, from a mailed floppy disk, the final draft of the peace agreement in his office at Mountain View. He had 60 spiral-bound copies produced and mailed them back for use in the April 1995 peace accords.
“In 1973, when we were trying to figure out international exchange, we had no idea where it would take us,” Grimes says.
ESCAPE TO MAGIC
Archbishop Gerardi, whom Grimes had known, was murdered in April 1998, two days after publishing an account of human-rights violations during the war. He was bludgeoned to death with a concrete block in the garage of his church.
Grimes couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Something snapped in me emotionally, psychologically when that happened,” he says. “I fled into magic. I couldn’t do the work anymore, so I became a magician.”
The Mark Wilson Magic Club at Mountain View was organized the same year Gerardi was assassinated. “Our first show was in 1998, and we’ve been doing them every year. The first one was just me standing in front of the library on a little platform,” he says. “Then it was three nights of magic every summer until 2020. We brought it back this year, and we had about 300 people over three nights.”
Grimes also had a sideline business in video production, making educational content for a company out of Huntsville, and that’s how Guatemala came back into his life.
He was asked to work on a video project called “The Death Squads of Guatemala,” which gathered testimony from survivors.
He once interviewed the president of Costa Rica for eight hours. The same day he recorded testimony from a death squad survivor, at the Catholic University of America in Washington, Grimes’ house in DeSoto was shot up, he says.
Grimes still lives in DeSoto with his wife of 54 years, Pam. They have two sons and a daughter, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
At one time a few years ago, three members of the Grimes family were employed at Mountain View: his daughter, a flute teacher at Duncanville High School, was teaching a dual-credit course, and his granddaughter tutored in the writing center.
“That has to be one of the proudest moments of my life,” he says.
