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.
