Through the Woodward World Culture Fair, Nathan Draper met the father who died before he was born.

Patrick Andrew Draper died in 1987 when a car crashed through a Seattle parking garage wall and landed on his truck. His widow Lisa gave birth to Nathan four months later.

With the support of his mother, Draper chose researching his father as his project for the eighth-grade Culture Fair, which will be on display at Woodward Middle School March 21.

“It used to bother me that my older brother knew him and I didn’t,” Nathan said. “I asked about him, but most of the time I just thought about him.”

“The boys had never seen the newspaper articles. I had kept them away from all that,” Lisa Draper said. “Nathan cried so much when we visited his grave I stopped taking him when he was in third grade. But now it’s five years later and it’s a good time for Nathan to learn about him and to know him.”

World Culture Fair, the annual display of students’ family research, has been an Bainbridge eighth-grade rite of passage for more than two decades, long-term Woodward teacher Keri Schmit says.

“It grew out of studying American history in this district,” Schmit said. “Students would be looking at the immigrant experience, so the focus was ethnicity.”

Over two decades, the Culture Fair project has turned into research on a broader array of influences that shape family identity, from defining historical events to choices of vocation.

“Culture comes to you through your family, so the project requires teens to talk to relatives – and some don’t like it at first,” Schmit said, “but, like Nathan, they often come to find it very worthwhile.”

Draper started his project by writing to his dad’s five brothers and five sisters.

Seven of his father’s siblings wrote back to Draper from locales as far-flung as France. Several included original poetry that would become part of the project, as did Draper’s own verse. The letters contained verbal sketches of his dad that surprised Draper.

“He was the family rebel and black sheep,” Draper said. “He got too many speeding tickets, so his brother had to drive him to school. He’d kick his brother out of the car and drive off.”

But after he married Lisa Paschke, Draper’s adventurous spirit found outlet in scuba diving and spear-fishing. In one of the photographs Draper displays, the fish his father holds by the gills is nearly as long as his torso.

The resemblance of father to the son is striking, in photographs of Patrick Draper slicing his wedding cake, or holding the newborn daughter who would die of SIDS.

Draper and his mother both admit that resurrecting the past has been difficult for her.

“Nathan had to pry and wait for answers,” Lisa Draper said. “It has been an emotional road.”

Draper also says he appreciates the encouragement he got from his stepfather, Robert Grimm.

For Nathan, reconstructing the past has meant coming to terms with tragedy.

“When I was brought into this world, I was given the name Nathan Patrick Andrew Draper,” he wrote, “I was named after a father I never knew. Despite the tragedies that had haunted my family...we still went on and we kept going, with my new dad helping me grow up, loving and caring for me.

“And I have realized that when a person dies, what is left are the memories that people hold in their hearts.”

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World Culture Fair is 6:30-8:30 p.m. March 21 in the Woodward Middle School Commons, and includes food and entertainment. Information: 842-4787.

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