Memories of St. Mary's High

As I approach the last two weeks of my teaching career, I am looking back over the forty-one years of teaching; and, in particular, to the first days of that career. The memories I have of 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 the job was not for him, and I was hired to teach Freshman World History and Senior English at St. Mary’s High School 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 said. 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 kids were spirited but great. I was happy. Over the next two years, I put my heart and my soul into my teaching, taking on the worst class that the school had seen in a long time, planning activities that would give them pride in themselves. Two years later, all but two graduated. I spent long hours in the school, teaching, counseling, coaching freshmen basketball, directing school plays and attending every dance and prom the school had for three years. Because of the long drive home, I stayed in school on the nights of the dances and worked on my schoolwork. Local parents, when they found out that I was in the building, 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 high school students, some of them drunk, counseling them and offering them my concern. Soon it became known, and the kids would get there ahead of me, just to talk. My girlfriend insisted I see the movie, “To Sir with Love.” I don’t know why. I was living it. And when I got up every 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 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’ll be smart.”

However, my happiness was to last for only two years. In the third year, I led a lay teachers’ strike against a new principal who 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, 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, I watched the class I had spent the last two years trying to save, graduate. One particularly small boy that I had gotten involved in track a few years ago smiled at me as he passed me, going down the aisle to graduate. He would become, in later years, Congressman Christopher Smith from the Fourth District of New Jersey. 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 the class. Later that day, the underclassmen had a party for all the teachers at the VFW Hall to say goodbye to us. A tough hard-edged kid I had tried to work with, stood in the corner, tears streaming down his eyes.

The following day, I went back to the school to clean my desk out. As I walked around the corner of the school, Duke Herron and Eddie Gandy were sitting on the stairs at the entrance to the school to help me pack up. Later,I took a picture of them sitting on the window, holding the name plate from the Blue and White Room 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 High School 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 some of the happiest years of my life. I had a lot in common with the students who sat in front of me that 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 began a journey that would last over the next 42 years of my life and 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.