“Grounded in the Grit and Guts of Life”

Trucking to Teaching

“Paving People Paths” is a term that can be interpreted both literally and figuratively. It represents my early truck driving days hauling materials for paving roads and highways. Providing transportation pathways in our country. “Paving paths” can also mean to assist and guide people to successfully determine their own best roads to the future through education.

Until I was 21 years old, my life had been dominated by being a student, an athlete, and a truck driver: three worlds that were commingled while growing up in Braidwood. Although I was passionate about learning, I never considered myself an outstanding student. In sports, I loved baseball but my latent athletic skills were in basketball. Truck driving grounded me with the “grit and guts of life” along with my appreciation/respect for the working class who, like my dad, are overlooked and disrespected.

“Grit and guts” was a way of describing my dad’s world of work. I shared that world with him during my early years and I remained “grounded” regardless of future “professional” employment.

After graduation from Lewis College in May and marriage in June of 1962, my path seemed established and confirmed. I had a contract to teach and coach at a new Christian Brothers high school in Aurora and Dolores and I would be starting our family. Then, in July, I got a call from General Manager Frank Lane of the Chicago Zephyrs. Would I consider giving the NBA a shot? I had been drafted in the spring but considered pro basketball a long shot and I had already committed my services to Roncalli High School principal, Brother Stephen.

Brother Stephen, a staunch basketball fan, didn’t hesitate when he said, “We will keep the position open for you. Odds are that you won’t make the squad, so give it a try and we will wait for you.” My path would take a detour for a few months before the odds won out.

Roncalli and Providence High Schools

Having just been released from the NBA team and arriving a week late for my teaching assignment in the fall of 1962, I found myself standing in front of 20 high school freshman boys silently daring me to enlighten them. They had already begun congealing as a group and I posed as the new guy in an old school building that had previously been Holy Angels Catholic Grade School in Aurora, Illinois. (Scheduled for demolition the next year.)

My new team now consisted of two Christian Brothers and me, comprising our complete staff, faculty, and administration. Our school had about 40 freshmen boys that would be supplemented successively over the next 3 school years with new students and a new campus on Farnsworth Ave.

Unaware that my world was transitioning radically, these youngsters had no idea who this tall, skinny guy was… and could have cared less. They, too, were going through a strange, traumatic phase of their lives, from boyhood to manhood.

Living in Joliet, I would be driving 22 miles to the school consuming about two hours a day. For the next four years, I taught English and coached three sports. In the fifth year I taught and coached at Providence High school in New Lenox, Il while being the assistant baseball coach at Lewis College. During those five years, I balanced teaching, correcting papers, preparing classes, and coaching three seasons a year while driving trucks during the summers. In the meantime, Dolores worked much of the time and mothered the first three of our five children.

My path was similar to the paths of my students. There were rough spots, a few potholes, and U-turns. I felt that the strict structures of education were limiting and stale, that new approaches to learning might better suit student populations. The high school teaching experience, lectures with little active student participation, seemed to dull young minds. Meanwhile, I saw how noon-time intramural sports created more enthusiasm and rewards to students than sitting at desks. 

My passion for innovative education delivery systems and all-inclusive intramural athletic activities had been sparked and a new path was being charted to athletic coaching and sports administration. That path quickly led to genius Coach Gordie Gillespie and Lewis College where there was fertile ground for innovative coaching and intramural programming. “Paving people paths” would be continued on the college level. 

Before and after: above first Roncalli class in 1962. Below, a Roncalli reunion a few years ago.