Richard Larkin
Life after La Salle—and Back Again
If people in general tend to stick with what they’re successful at, I suppose the fact that the activities of my life were mostly connected with schools points to my having had an excellent experience at La Salle Academy. I spent 38 of the last 60 years either attending or teaching school, 35½ of those with the Brothers of the Christian Schools.
College. Because of its access to New York City, I chose to enroll in the Liberal Arts program at Manhattan College, the Christian Brothers’ school in the Bronx. Tom Hannaway of our class and Bob Mattis ’60 were also students at the college; Joe Nunes and Tony Ramsey, class of 1962, would follow in the next year. The Liberal Arts program was extraordinary in its structure, based as it was on reading the primary texts of the history, literature and philosophy of Western Civilization, as well as following the development of the fine arts through the centuries. There were only four sections, with a total of about 100 students in the program, one of whom earned world renown dozens of years later due to his performance in a national catastrophe.
Though ordinarily a shy person, I had had a highly satisfying time performing in drama productions at La Salle, especially under the direction of Br. Angelus Eugene in our junior and senior years. From the first auditions at Manhattan I participated all through college, acting in about four plays a year. During the summer of 1965, between getting a B.A. in English and starting graduate school, I was lucky to do ten plays at the Merry-Go-Round Theatre in Stur-bridge, Mass. The names of two members of that company would be known to those of you who are familiar with the television programs and movies of the 1970s. Again, in the summer of 1966 I was a member of The New Comedy Theatre in Parsippany, N.J.
Graduate School. Intending to pursue a doctorate in the subject, I was enrolled in the English department of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University in September 1965. Needless to say, I was exposed to a wealth of academic and cultural opportunities that I greatly enjoyed and benefited from. After two and a half years, however, having completed the requirements for a master’s degree, I could not face the prospect of going through another four or five years of study before I could achieve a doctorate and withdrew from the university.
Military Service. Though by the spring of 1968 the Selective Service was no longer granting graduate-school deferments, I guessed that I was now even more likely to be drafted than if I had stayed in school. Before I received my “Greeting” from Uncle Sam, I did obtain a teaching position at a college in Kentucky, which was obviated by the notice to report for induction on June 28, 1968.
At Fort Jackson, S.C., I went through Basic Training during July and a record-breaking hot August, and Advanced Individual Training as a combat infantryman during September and October. After two weeks’ leave I reported to Oakland Army Base on November 19 for shipment to Vietnam.
I arrived in-country at Long Binh Replacement Depot on Saturday, November 23. After a week’s orientation—and the observation of Thanksgiving Day with a traditional turkey dinner some of us were assigned to the 199th Infantry Brigade (Separate, Light). Then my fate changed.
The NCO from the 199th who was organizing the newly arrived group asked if any of us could type. My hand shot up to the sky! Of course, I had to prove my claim by practical methods, and after another few days of orientation, I was choppered out on December 8 to the brigade’s forward operations center located in a converted fishnet factory south of Saigon, where I was to spend the next six months.
Being of a literal mind, I did not find it difficult to master the Army style manual, and I asked that my old college handbook be sent from home as a reference for standard grammar and usage questions. I can’t recall the complete variety of written work that the Operations section was responsible for, but it included a daily morning summary of field operations, operations orders, memos between command units, and responses to requests from civilian members of the U.S. government. The clarity and accuracy of my work earned the respect of my superiors, and I felt that I was fulfilling my duties by helping to save lives.
In June 1969 the brigade was attached to the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment (“Black-horse”) east-southeast of Saigon, under the command of Major General George S. Patton III. The last move the 199th made before I left country was in September, to the town of Xuan Loc, northeast of Saigon, the loss of which later turned out to be a significant defeat for the South Vietnamese army in the final days of the North Vietnamese advance in the spring of 1975.
In order to be able to leave the Army as soon as I finished my tour in Vietnam (rather than serve another seven months stateside), I took advantage of a provision to extend my stay for two months beyond the obligatory one year. As the calendar worked out, I had observed two Thanksgivings and two Christmases in-country by the time I arrived home at the end of January 1970.
Not in School. Aside from an extended Eurasian tour that brought me full-circle around the world to Japan, and some failed attempts to find a teaching position in college, my career stalled for two years.
At the beginning of 1972, a former Manhattan College classmate living in the Bronx offered to put me up and help me find a job in New York. After following disparate leads for six weeks, I began work as a counselor in a small group home for boys run by the Catholic Guardian Society of the Archdiocese of New York in another part of the Bronx. This position was obviously far afield of my previous occupational goal, but, surprisingly, I found myself both competent at the task and enjoying it.
Seeing my fitness for the work, a high-school teacher who came to the home regularly to tutor some of the boys suggested that I look into teaching on the secondary level. Certification could be initiated through equivalency exams in the field of education given in May by the New York State Education Department. I then studied for, took and passed those exams. In the meantime, I sent letters applying to Catholic high schools in the area and had several interviews, to no immediate avail.
It was not until the Monday before Thanksgiving of 1972, after I had spent the summer and fall focused on an entirely different literary project, that I got a call from St. Raymond High School for Boys—coincidentally a Christian Brothers’ school (until a couple of years ago)—in yet a different part of the Bronx
St. Raymond’s. From the beginning of the spring semester in 1973 until the completion of the 1982 school year, I taught English at St. Raymond’s. (A Christian Brother alumnus of the class of ’82 just finished a term as an Auxiliary Visitor of the Brothers’ Northeastern province.)
Having learned the previous year that I enjoyed working with teenagers, I was now also able—contrary to my original goal of obtaining a doctorate—to apply my academic expertise daily in a stimulating and continuously refreshing way: I had found my vocation.
The high school is housed in a converted commercial building several blocks away from St. Raymond church and elementary school, as it had been started only about a dozen years be-fore my arrival in order to advance educational opportunities for the boys of the parish. Considering the student population of several hundred, quarters were cramped, with one-way corridor and stairway traffic rules. Perhaps these conditions added to the friendly, community atmosphere.
For some reason, I remember having taught American Literature, the sophomore curriculum, more than any other course. Yet the greeting I most often received from former students was “Read the will!”, the plebeian crowd’s demand during Marc Antony’s funeral oration from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, a ninth-grade selection.
To my additional delight, I was able to start directing plays, which I did every fall semester from 1976 to 1981, with the addition of spring musicals in 1981 and ’82. These were per-formed in the St. Raymond parish auditorium, which you can easily see on your left going through the Bronx if you travel by Amtrak to New York.
Although I was happy building a successful career in New York, a developing family situation demanded a life-changing decision. My two brothers were each raising their families 1,000 miles away in different directions. Back in Rhode Island, my aunt was seriously ill and my mother was of course aging. Instead of uprooting them to the Bronx, I thought that I was more adaptable and could look for a teaching position in Rhode Island. During the spring semester of 1982, I sent an application to the Diocese of Providence, as well as letters to the principals of the Catholic high schools in the area.
A couple of interviews resulted from my efforts, including at the diocesan school office and—during Holy Week, in the middle of a snowstorm—with Br. Jerome Corrigan, the new principal of La Salle Academy. Though no offers of employment were made to me, I took a leap of faith and moved back to Rhode Island at the end of June. Before I left St. Raymond’s, I received the great and distinct honor of having the 1982 yearbook dedicated to me.
Back at La Salle. As had been the case ten years earlier, it was not until the middle of November, after I had spent the summer fulfilling family responsibilities and busying myself with projects around the house, that Br. Jerome contacted me for another interview. Having given a demonstration lesson, I was hired. After an orientation meeting with Tom Lowery, the English Department Chair, I began my 22-year stint teaching at La Salle on the Monday after Thanksgiving—coincidentally, in the same classroom where I had begun my high-school education 25 years earlier.
(In my first year back teaching at La Salle, my colleagues included alumni whom you may have known: Kevin Regan of our class; Ted Dambruch and Gerry DeLuca ’59; Charles Rupacz ’60; Joe Ciuryla and Tony Ramsey ’62; and Joe Kopka and Mike McNamara ’63.)
(In addition, some of our former teachers were still around, most in different positions from those they had held in our school years: Carl Toti ’36; Thomas “Ted” Lowery ’37; Louis “Lou” Cimini and John “Jake” Powell ’39; Robert “Knobby” Walsh ’47; and Robert “Bob” Petit ’49; as well as Brothers Andrew ’26, Anthony ’24 (our Athletic Director), C. Edmund and A. James. Kathleen “Kay” Corry, honorary graduate, was completing 43 years of continuous employment, as executive secretary.)
One September morning in 1983, we employees of four Catholic high schools were called to the diocesan auditorium for the surprise announcement by Bishop Gelineau that, due to overall declining enrollment, La Salle Academy, St. Patrick (Girls) High School, St. Mary Academy of the Visitation and Our Lady of Providence High School (Seminary) would be merged into one Providence Central Catholic High School the following school year, to be housed in the La Salle Academy building.
There was great protesting by the La Salle community as a result of this announcement. Students filled the auditorium during the last period of the following school day to denounce, especially, losing the name “La Salle Academy.” By November the bishop had revised the merger plan so that the name of the Academy would remain, and the principal would be a Christian Brother. (Our Lady of Providence High School did not participate in the new scheme.)
For the rest of the school year many serious and productive meetings were held among us members of the merging schools, covering social, psychological, and practical issues of the physical plant, as well as curricular planning. When prospective students arrived with their families for open house that fall, the thrust stage of the first play I was directing at the school bulked large in the auditorium.
In March of 1984 all of the faculty had to apply for our jobs under the new administration, including an interview at the diocesan school office in downtown Providence. Many of us were justifiably upset when our hiring notices did not arrive in the mail on the appointed day because of a late season snowstorm.
Beginning with the opening of the coeducational La Salle Academy in September, 1984, the set of administrators changed for three consecutive years, until the President-Principal model, still in use, was instituted in 1987. The resulting stability of the school structure, especially under the talented leadership of Br. Frederick Mueller as principal, raised academic rigor as well as morale, and enrollment began to increase during the ’90s.
I continued to direct plays every spring semester from 1985 till 1991, as it gradually became evident that the growing strengths of the professionally qualified teachers in the arts department were superseding my limited skills for that endeavor. Nevertheless, in 1996 and 2002 I was privileged to participate in two original musicals with book and lyrics written by the Arts Department Chair and sometime vice principal and principal Michael Scanlan. In the meantime I had been appointed chair of the English Department under the new administration, where I served from 1987 to 1997 and from 2000 to 2004. I also held the position of Faculty Senate Chair for an extended period of time.
Unlike many high-school teachers, I enjoyed teaching freshman English, because I believed that I was able to instill good academic habits in ninth-graders. On the other hand, from 1989 on, I also taught Advanced Placement English to seniors, which provided challenges for both me and my students. Also, from the time that it was put into the curriculum, I always taught the semester elective in Public Speaking, and am pleased to have received appreciative comments on the course from former students.
A final treat for me every year that I taught at La Salle (except for the first year of the merger) was coaching the student graduation speakers, the results of which were immediately appreciable, unlike the products of classroom teaching, which may take many years to come to fruition. I used to try to have my students understand that “We are human in four dimensions”: that we not only share the nature of, and are connected to, all living humankind, but are also the heirs of those who have done good before us and are responsible to leave the world a better place for those who will come after us.
The most intricate responsibility given to me during my years working at La Salle Academy was the organization of the decennial year-long self-studies and preparation of reports for the school’s accrediting body, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, in both 1992-93 and 2002-03. That process culminated, in each instance, in a successful three-day evaluation by a visiting committee comprising representatives of independent schools throughout New England.
The first years of the new century saw greater visible improvements to the La Salle campus than had taken place since the 1930s. Br. Michael McKenery, the school’s second president, was, first, responsible for building the McLaughlin Athletic Center in 2000, providing for expanding arts facilities in the school basement, including a new theater in the space that had been occupied for 75 years by the gym.
There came a time when the diocese made it possible to receive a full pension when the combination of an employee’s age and years of employment reached a certain number. In my case, this occurred in 2004. Everyone in the school using the back staircases during my last year of teaching could witness the progress in the construction of the Shea Science and Student Center, which was to finally add an adequate cafeteria and more space for other student services to the school complex.
The years before my retirement produced an accumulation of traumas for the La Salle community to deal with, including the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; the revelations of clergy sex abuse in the winter of 2002; and the deaths and injuries from the Station nightclub fire in West Warwick on February 20, 2003.
Retirement. When people ask me what I do in my retirement, I tell them simply, “I garden and I cook.” I am closely attuned to the passing of the seasons. For a couple of years I did some free-lance copy editing for a series of guides to Shakespeare plays intended for middle-school students.
As Br. Thomas Gerrow was assuming the office of third president of La Salle in the spring of 2012, he undertook a project to make an impressive display in the first-floor corridor of the main school building, where the cafeteria used to be and where several administration offices are now located. I was honored to be called back to be part of the committee that, in a period of a few months, produced a series of panels running the length of the corridor depicting stages in the history of the school through historic photos and artwork, with captions.
Now called “Heritage Hallway,” it was added to on the opposite wall in the following year with scenes from the life of St. John Baptist de La Salle painted by a graduate; a map of the mission of the Christian Brothers around the world; and plaques (later removed to the conference room in the Brothers’ house) of some two dozen alumni selected for their significant accomplishments. Later still, we moved to a prominent place and rededicated the memorial to members of the La Salle community who have given their lives in service to their country, and mounted a continually updated display of the names of the members of the La Salle Academy Hall of Fame.
Beginning in January 2018, I was part of a subcommittee working on a commemorative book as an element of the ongoing plans for the 150th Anniversary observances of the school. Then COVID hit, and I have been separated from that task for the past year and a half while the activities of the anniversary were rescheduled.
Richard Larkin <richard.larkin@verizon.net>
Saturday, October 02, 2021 at 16:28:40 (EDT)