St. Mary’s High School Class of 1971 40th Class Reunion

Address to the Class of 1971:

Over the last forty years, when I have looked back to my first three years of teaching at Saint Mary’s High School, I have been continually reminded of the strength of the foundation those years laid for me, a foundation on which I built the whole rest of my teaching career. Never have I been more reminded of that fact than tonight.

In September of 1968, I was 22 years old and had just graduated from St. Peter’s College that spring. Four days after the school year had begun, a young teacher had decided that teaching was not for him, and so I was hired to teach Freshman World History and Senior English the Friday of the first week of school by dribbling a basketball between my legs in the principal’s office. That Friday afternoon, I walked into the first classroom on the right on the second floor of St. Mary’s. It had high ceilings, and high windows that had to be opened and closed with a pole. The cloakroom was in the back, behind forty-eight wooden desks. A massive oak teacher’s desk was centered in the front of the room. I walked over to the windows and looked out. Ahead of me stretched the rooftops of Perth Amboy, and the Outer Bridge that connected New Jersey to Staten Island. It was my first high school classroom. It was my first year as a teacher.

At the end of that first year, full of myself and of the confidence that only one year of teaching can give, I had the nerve to ask Sister Joachim into give me, for the next two years, a class of probably the most contentious, stubborn and thick-headed students that the school had seen in a very long time. And yet, it was these students that would teach me what teaching was really about, would challenge me to learn my subject material deeper and broader so that I could make my classes more academically challenging for them, and would challenge me to find new and inventive solutions to channel their sometimes overwhelming energies into productive endeavors. It was these students who coaxed the heart out of me in those two years, and gave me the motivation to want to teach for the rest of my life.

Over those next two years, I taught them English and Dramatic Arts, was their class advisor, their homeroom teacher, their mentor (when they let me), their counselor (when they would listen to me) and their coach, from time to time, in basketball. I attended all of their Friday night dances, their Junior Dance, their Senior Cotillion and their Senior Prom. I worked with them for two Christmases on toy drives that provided Christmas presents for hundreds of children and the elderly, and went up to McAuley Hall with them to watch them visit with the special needs children who were schooled there.

I remember as if it were yesterday Hoey and Herits on the Johnny Carson Show on New Year’s Eve; the antics of Simone, Yusko and Strubel, the Three Musketeers; the “Beat Them” and the “Na Na Na Na, Hey, Hey, Goodbye” cheers of Kindzierski, Parente, McHugh, Kessell and company; Fulvio in Hildenbrandt’s coat (Kathy Hildenbrandt’s, that is); the Great Gildersleeve; the penetrating questions of Pat Grace and Rod Marvin; Janet Gromadski’s carrot cake and horoscopes; Kalanta’s floor slides; Karasiewicz’s wrestling demolitions; Starosciak’s quick wit and Gerry Martin’s wry sense of humor; the baseball skills of Mullen, Heiser and Fruehwirth; Renner’s haircut; Kathy Ruetsch and the yearbook mafia; and the thousands and thousands of hours of talking about boyfriends and girlfriends, joys and sorrows, life and love in my classroom after school as well as at the large round tables of the Reo Diner on Saturday nights when I was supposed to be on dates with young ladies who learned that to date me was to date my students.

At the end of those two years, on June 6th, 1971, forty years ago, you graduated. On that day, you gave me a plaque, and a sheet cake that had written on it “Our Best Wishes and Love Will Follow You Always.” I want to tell you tonight - that it has.

Over the last six months, as we worked together on this reunion and trying to find your classmates, I was reminded again that you are still the sensitive, caring, generous yet modest men and women I remember as teenagers forty years ago. To this day, I don't even think you realize how very proud I am, and have always been, of having been your teacher, and how proud I am of the adults you have become. And how much, over these forty years, I have missed you!

In case I never said it before, tonight, at the 40th anniversary of your graduation, I just wanted you to know.

A Writing Group Is Announced

A Writing Group Is Announced

Sorry for the cheesy rip-off of the Agatha Christie title, but I couldn’t help myself.

In January of this year, we started a poetry writing group in the Monmouth County, New Jersey area. In Eatontown, at the Eatontown Public Library, to be precise. The purpose of this group was, and still is, to provide a supportive environment for local working poets from the Monmouth County area to write, as well as to provide information, feedback and support.

We have met once a month at the Eatontown Library since January and have chosen a name for ourselves. We are The Jersey Shore Poets, not to be confused with the television show of almost the same name, and with no relation. (No point in making a Situation out of it.)

The group is still open to anyone who is interested in writing poetry in a “productive” environment. And, while it has slowly developed a character of its own, it is still a work in progress, with the flexibility to respond to the ever-changing needs of the group.

Once again, while I know that this is an unusual use of this blog to announce the formation of a writing group, I am taking advantage of the generosity of the website New Jersey Poets and Poetry (http://njpoetspoetry.blogspot.com/) who posts my blog in their Blog Roll, to circulate the information about the formation and the progress of this new group.

As always, anyone wishing to participate in this new enterprise can contact me at cabogart@aol.com, and I will answer any questions they might have, as well as provide them the particulars, and the where and when of our regular meetings.

My Memories of St. Mary's Revisited

My Memories of St. Mary's Revisited
Christopher Bogart

I originally posted this entry on Sunday, June 6, 2010 as I was preparing to retire from teaching after a 42 year career. As the time came closer, I found myself musing about the career I was about to voluntarily give up; and, much to my surprise, I was not thinking of the last 25 years of that career in Long Branch, or even the 9 years I had spent in other schools, but of the first three years of my career, a career I had begun in Perth Amboy in September of 1968. Since this seemed rather odd, I committed my musings to paper, and posted them on this blog.

Since then, because of the phenomena of social networking on the Internet
that I joined in December of last year, I have revisited them a number of times. In a word, I got on Facebook. And much to my surprise, there they all were! Well, not all of them, but over a hundred of them, and the number is still growing. By “they,” I am referring to my former students from St. Mary’s High School in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. As Gerry Simone, one of those former St. Mary’s students has described it, it was a “WOW!” moment.

I don’t exactly know how to relate what happened the day it happened; but, since then, I have been living with the repercussions of it. So I am re posting the original post here now (with a few revisions for accuracy). And some postscript.


Memories of St. Mary’s High

As I approach the last two weeks of a forty-two year teaching career, I find myself looking back over it; and, in particular, to the first days of that career. The memories I have of these first years at St. Mary’s High School in Perth Amboy are very special to me. They were my first. They were, in many ways, my happiest teaching memories.

In September of 1968, I was 22 years old and had just graduated from St. Peter’s College that spring. Four days after the school year had begun, a young teacher had decided that teaching was not for him, and so I was hired to teach Freshman World History and Senior English at St. Mary’s High School in Perth Amboy, New Jersey the Friday of the first week of school by dribbling a basketball between my legs in the principal’s office. “We need young men as role models for our boys.” Sister Joachim had told me. That Friday afternoon, I walked into the first classroom on the right on the second floor of St. Mary’s. It had high ceilings, and high windows that had to be opened and closed with a pole. The cloakroom was in the back, behind forty-eight wooden desks. A massive oak teacher’s desk was centered in the front of the room. I walked over to the windows and looked out. Ahead of me stretched the rooftops of Perth Amboy, and the Outer Bridge that connected New Jersey to Staten Island. It was my first high school classroom. The students were spirited, but overall, great kids. I was happy.

Over the next two years, I put my heart and my soul into my teaching. In my second year, I took on the worst class that the school had seen in a long time, and planned activities that would give them a sense of pride in themselves. Two years later, all but two of them graduated. I spent long hours in the school, teaching, counseling, coaching freshmen basketball as well as helping with the JV and Varsity, directing school plays and attending every dance and prom the school had for three years. Because the drive home each night was over a half hour, I stayed in school on the nights of the dances and worked on my lesson plans and schoolwork. Local parents, when they saw my lone car in the school parking lot, sent their sons over to invite me to dinner. I felt that that would be inappropriate, so I politely declined. Soon, they would send their younger children over with dinner in covered dishes, so I wouldn't “starve” until the dance began. Even when I went out on dates on Saturday nights, I would find myself at the Reo Diner in Woodbridge, with my date and a number of my high school students, some of them drunk, talking to them and offering them advice. Soon it became known that I would be there, and the kids got there ahead of me, just to talk. And when I got up every Monday morning, I couldn't wait to get to school.

During my first year as a teacher, at one of the priest’s twentieth anniversary party, a mother of one of my older students introduced me to her fifth grade son. After speaking to her for a few minutes, I tousled the boy’s blond hair and told him that I’d see him in a few years. As I walked away from them, I overheard his mother tell him “You’ve been touched by a teacher. You’re going to be smart.”

However, this idyllic environment was to last for only the two years. In the third year, faced with the knowledge of the diocesan plan to close the school, I led a lay teachers’ strike against a new principal who had changed the working conditions and salaries in an effort to force most of the lay teachers out of the school. The strike lasted two weeks. On Monday of the second week, the students were bused to school, but refused to enter the building. The following day they arrived again, but this time with picket’s signs that their parents helped them make. Every day they came, and picketed the school. On Friday night of that week, three students were driving to a friend’s house to make more picket signs when they were involved in an accident. After first aid was provided, all three went home. The following Monday, worried about the continued involvement of their students, the teachers came back to school, ending the strike, having gained nothing. It was the first lay teachers’ strike in the Diocese of Trenton, and it cost all of us our jobs.

On Graduation Day that June, I watched the class I had spent the last two years trying to save, graduate. When I led them back to the classroom to change out of their caps and gowns, there was a large sheet cake on my desk wishing me well in the future, and a plaque from my homeroom. Later that day, the underclassmen had a party for all the teachers at the VFW Hall to say goodbye to us.

The following day, I went back to the school to clean out my desk. As I walked around the corner of the school, Duke Herron and Eddie Gandy, two freshmen, were standing at the entrance to the school. When I asked them what they were doing there, Duke responded, “I just didn’t think you should have to do this alone.” When the room was emptied, I took a picture of them sitting on the window sill, holding the name plate from my classroom door, the city of Perth Amboy in the background. Two hours later, I thanked them, said goodbye, and drove out of the school parking lot for the last time. My heart felt like it was broken. But it would heal. It had too. I had to find another job. Ten years later, St. Mary’s closed its doors as a high school.

When I look back now at those three years at St. Mary’s High School in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, I have come to realize that they were three of the happiest years of my life. I had a lot in common with the students who sat in front of me that first day. I was only four years older than they; and, like them, still had long dark hair. With Jimmy Durek, Vinny Cuiffo, Joanne De Amicis, Larry McGrath, Bob Tarr, Micky McCann, James Shafranski, Mary Ann Bauer and over 150 others (some of my classes had as many as 48 students), I had begun a journey that would last for the next 42 years of my life. A journey that draws to a close in two weeks.

I can see their faces before my eyes as clearly as I can see the faces of the students I taught last Friday in my AP English 12 classes. The only difference is that my AP English students are 18 years old and the students in my first class are now 60. In my eyes, though, they are still 18 and probably always will be.
The students that I taught at St. Mary's High School in Perth Amboy, New Jersey were the students who taught me what teaching really was, and gave me the heart to want to teach for the rest of my life. They were, and still are today, kind hearted, trusting, and generous to a fault. They are, and will always be, my “first born.” To this day, I don't even think they know how very proud I am of having been their teacher, and how proud I am of the adults they have become. And how much I have missed them.

The cake that they gave me on their Graduation Day had written on it “Our Best Wishes and Love Will Follow You Always.” And it has.


That day in December, 2010 when I got on Facebook, I began a dialogue, not only with my former St. Mary’s students, whom I hadn’t spoken to or seen in 40 years, but to the students I had seen only a few months ago, and a lot of the ones in between.

I would like to make this very clear. I had a great forty-two year teaching career, and have fond memories of all of my students, no matter where they came from, or when I taught them. But, in all honesty, somehow the “firstborns” are always a little more special. And these firstborns certainly not only were, but are today.

This “reconnection” has sometimes been a mixed blessing. While I am now in touch with over 100 of them, some of them are no longer around. One young man, a freshman I coached on the Freshman Basketball team, Bobby Bader, and with whom I had shared a birthday, left this world less than 15 days before I discovered the rest. Honestly, I was not prepared for that.

However, as for the rest, it has been great. I am helping the Class of 1971 put together their 40th Reunion, a reunion I intend to attend. I have not only been able to regularly correspond with about 20 of my former students, and have talked to about 12 more, but recently I met with one of the two freshmen who came to help me move out on that last day and who is in the picture above sitting on the windowsill with his feet on the radiator, Duke Herron.

There seems to be a certain symmetry in all of this, an almost closing of a circle. Yet, nothing really has closed, just picked up where it left off over forty years ago and continues on after what has seemed like a brief hiccup in time. And that is all the analysis I intend to give it. I just plan now to enjoy it.

Do I See A Rainbow?

Do I See A Rainbow?
Christopher Bogart

Do I see a rainbow
in puddles of melted snow?

Does the mirrored water show
a season yet to come
while flora still sleeps
under mounds of white below?

While woodland animals lumber ‘round
weighted down by white caked limbs,
blood thickened by biting cold,
do I see this season getting old?

Is that patch of pale mold
forming on that tree bark
really beginning to burst with sparks
of new green life?

Is the air really rife with squeaking avian sounds,
or is that just the rusty hinge of an old screen door,
as it drags the mounded snow around
over the back deck floor?

Is the woodland whiteness really
turning brown, more and more?

Is that a rainbow I see
in that puddle of melting snow?

How long is it now
before winter finally goes?

Picnic

Picnic
Christopher Bogart

At the end of a hospital visit with my aunt,
I walked down the long blue corridor toward the elevators
and slowly gaining ground on an orderly dressed all in blue,
the fingers of his right hand were rapped firmly around
the rattan handles of a wicker picnic basket.

I must admit to a little curiosity,
if not a little amusement
at the incongruity of a picnic basket,
lined with a red and white checkered table cloth,
in the hands of a hospital orderly.

We turned together to face the elevator door.
I was heading to my car to bring my aunt home,
he, I mused, to a plot of green grass under a small tree,
maybe across from the hospital parking lot; and,
in that semi-secluded spot, to enjoy a quiet lunch,
away from illness and grim realities of a hectic hospital day.

The doors rolled opened slowly.
He gestured for me to enter first,
then he turned and faced the door.
“What floor?” he asked as he pushed the button labeled B.
“Ground Floor, please.” I responded.
He nodded and pressed G.

I sighed as I thought of my aunt’s recent illness,
and how happy I was to be taking her home.

The elevator lurched into action, and downward.
He stared, solemnly, at the metallic doors.
To break the tension, I opined
“You must be looking forward to lunch.”
Then asked, “Going on a picnic?”
He turned his head, ever so slightly toward me
and smiled ever so politely,
if a little pointed,
then looked down at the basket in his hand.
“Oh. You mean this.” He sighed with a heavy heart.

Hardly an attitude to take at the prospect of a picnic.

“No.” he said. “This isn’t what you think.”
Well, I wondered, what else could it be?
“This,” and he gestured to the basket, “is so not to alarm the visitors.
I am transporting this infant to the morgue in the basement.”

In the brief silence that ensued, mercifully,
the bell rung and the doors of the elevator opened.
“Ground floor.” He stated plainly,
and to my eternal relief,
he stepped aside to let me pass.

I did not look back, as the doors closed behind me,
And the elevator made its solemn way to the basement below.
I had to get my car.
My aunt was being released from the hospital today.

The Madonnas of the Plastic Bags

The Madonnas of the Plastic Bags
Christopher Bogart

their barreled bodies poured into
stretch slacks of pink and black,
their backs hunched in repeated stoopings,
they climb out the back of a black pickup truck,
silently as to not disturb the clientele
sipping frapaccino on the curb.

Their thick brown fingers clutch empty black bags,
their plastic shining dull images of pain,
left to wane in the fading light.

They reach their aching arms up to the air
as would a chubby child
gesticulating the fate how high
to pull full bags, bags
stuffed to overflow with the detritus of the upper middle class day,
of circulars and shopping bags from high-end stores,
of plastic water bottles and cardboard cups
escheoned with the green Starbuck’s logo,
of crumpled paper napkins and transparent straws.

They lift the bags high, the elevation of the host of refuse
now slid out from their circular wrought iron containers,
now carried carefully to the truck,
now slung over the gate and into the back of its flat bed,
destined to be dumped, emptied at a date and time
unknown to all but the continued monotony of the act,
repeated in a laborious litany of container after container,
store after high-end store,
again and again and again.

And when their day is finally done,
these middle aged madonnas crawl
into their flat bed
and pray
for rain tomorrow.