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.
