The late ’60s were exciting, turbulent times, especially for a young man growing up in a Catholic seminary.  When I entered the Juniorate of the Brothers of the Sacred Heart in Pascoag, RI in 1966, there were 24 of us guys (most of whom were gay, I now realize), from all parts of New York/New England.  We were the future of the Order, just as hundreds of young men who had come before us over the past half century.  But something happened along the way–Vatican II, rock music, flower power, the anti-war movement, the political and cultural awakening enabled by the Beat movement and personified by the Hippie movement.  That awakening decimated American seminaries, as religious candidates began to question their faith and tuned in to personal discovery and freedom. By my sophomore year, twelve of us remained; by my junior year, only 3.  The Order, reeling from the loss of so many young and middle-aged brothers, shut down the Juniorate, sold off the property, and shipped the three of us seminarians to Woonsocket to attend Mt St Charles, one of the Brothers’ high schools.

There I began to reenter the secular world, going to school with regular local kids, and returning to the Brothers’ residence (a former hospital–my bedroom had been Minor Surgery, complete with blood spatters all over the ceiling) at night.  During summer vacation after my junior year, I heard about the strange event called Woodstock, and shook my head in wonderment and confusion.  When I returned to school in the fall, I remember vividly my friends recounting their adventures at Woodstock–they were profoundly changed by that experience, and suddenly the world had changed for me.  I had had an aha! moment that changed the course of my own life. I quickly began to question my faith, all that I had been brought up to believe. Perhaps it was the times, because I very quickly shed the burden of all that Catholic weight from my shoulders–an epiphany of Paulian proportions.

And of course, my outward appearance began to change with the time.  Even with the strict seminary dress code, I began to let my sideburns drop (like Neil Young’s), and my hair lengthen as much as permitted.  By the end of senior year, I had donned a whole new perspective on life, as an idealist atheist, heading off to college to become a psychologist. As part of that new image, I vowed to let my hair down.

And just at the right time. The Boston of 1970 was a hotbed of antiwar protest and hippie culture, and I easily slipped into the student lifestyle. And, the music! The Beatles, The Stones, Cream, The Who, and King Crimson dominated the turntable in our dorm living room.  And then Jethro Tull caught my attention–there was something about the English flute-folk sensibility combined with electric-guitar power that made me instantly follow Ian Anderson.  Then and there, I vowed to grow my hair like my new hero.

And so I did, much to Mom and Dad’s chagrin.  Dad would refer to me as my son “Jesus.”  And Mom, who didn’t want me to go into the seminar at 14, now regretted that I had left, and was an atheist to boot!  Mom had recurring happy dreams that I came home with my hair cut…

And so it went through college, all the way through graduation (see my attached booth photo right around graduation time).  I had lived the hippie dream, as I had vowed.  I wore a purple velvet suit (hand tailored by my talented teenage cousin) to my graduation dinner.  And, when one of my parents’ friends approached me during the spring of my senior year about applying for a job with his organization–the CIA, I was aghast at the thought of having to cut my hair!  You imagine correctly that the thought of working for the CIA was abhorrent, even immoral, and my prized hair remained unthreatened.

But of course, all things must change.  After graduation, I took a temporary job managing TopCopy, a Xerox copy center, while I pondered my future.  Not law school, not medical school, not psychotherapy, not an academic path…I gravitated instead to a career in public administration, and set about applying to masters programs.

To my good fortune, my terrific girlfriend had even more terrific parents who took an interest in my career. “If you’re interested in public management, why don’t you get an MBA with a public administration program,” they reasoned.  Back then, business school was immoral to the Hippie world view, so that idea took some convincing. Thank god I listened to them, applied to business schools, and got into a dream program, just as they suggested.

It was time to grow up.  Shortly after I signed my admission letter, I made the decision to cut my hair for the first time in five years. As my girlfriend accompanied me to the barber shop, my nervousness was only exceeded by the completely blase attitude of the barber.  Quite a punctuation to mark the end of a life phase…

The lessons from my father were never actually lessons.  That is what has stayed with me so strongly over all of these many years. They were life lessons that I learned, by osmosis, from this incredibly strong man of character and integrity, who had a stiff backbone in standing up for what he believed, and in doing “the right thing.”

He spent his too short lifetime spending monstrous numbers of hours working for activist causes, being involved in Democrat polities, and being a strong supporter of civil rights.  And yet he never told my brother or me that either of us should do any of that.  He simply led his life being 100% true to his principles and set of ethics, and we both watched him and learned from his actions.  Yes, he would tell us why he was supporting certain causes or working so hard for certain Democratic candidates or treating friends and family in a certain way, but he would never teach it as any sort of lesson.

Watching and observing as a sponge — yes, as I grew older I realized that’s what had occurred.   There are so many life lessons that I learned from him, but here are two that I think about fondly, and almost reverently.   One was during one of two summers that my family belonged to a swim club, and my mother would take my brother and I there daily during those summers, as it was her summer time off from teaching.  It was a wonderful world for a 12 and then 13 year old boy–filled with tons of other families and kids around my age.  My father would work all day at the office and seeing his accounting clients, and then would make the long, half hour drive out to the country to relax at the pol and have dinner with us.  One of those early evenings my dad and I were in the locker room changing back from swim suits to shorts and tops, and there were probably about six to eight other kids in the room, plus a couple other fathers.  One of those was a large, ponderous man who was speaking very loudly, and clearly, to me, had had too much to drink.  He was speaking to another man, and was relaying his anger about how black people were “becoming uppity,” and the “n” word was in the midst of his sentence.  My father turned to him, and said:  “Please–there are young people here, and it is totally inappropriate for you to use language like that.”  The man continued without missing a beat, and then my dad, very quietly, but sternly, made a similar request again.   The man stared at my dad in disbelief, and then swelled up with more bombast and anger,and responded: “I’ll speak about those porch monkeys any way I want what are you, Al, a “n-lover?”!   My father then dropped him, with one punch.  Yes, dropped him.    And I had never, ever, seen my father physically respond to anyone like that.   And rather than any sort of fear, or embarrassment, I felt a great sense of pride, to see my dad stand up for what he believed in.

My father was a CPA, and he loved having his own office, in which he “did the books” for over 200 small independently owned mama/papa businesses.    He never enjoyed “pushing a pencil,” as he always called it, but loved being the free business counselor to his clients, as they would ask him all types of business questions related to their dress shop, or drug store, or small restaurant, etc.  And during tax season when I was in high school I would always come in to work for him on Saturdays and some days after school, and I would see these clients come in to their office with their briefcases and boxes of papers.   But there also was a stream of other men who would come to the office toting shopping bags of papers and receipts — I  grew to learn that these were all people he grew up with in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, and they were all struggling to make ends meet.  I so often heard them say:  “Al, make me a tax return.”   And I also learned that their prior years’ returns were all kept in two bottom drawers of one of the file cabinets.  As my father’s business would go up and down over the years, based on generally him hiring two many accounting clerks because he didn’t want to “push a pencil,” I would hear my parents arguing in the evenings and on weekends regarding money struggles at home.   And one of the sore subjects that always came up was my mother’s upset over why my dad would be doing all of these free annual tax returns, while he was neglecting to complete work for some of his most prosperous clients.   And he would always say:  “because we were friends growing up, and they need help; if I don’t help them, who will?  And why should my most prosperous clients get preferential treatment, just because they’ve become self important?  It can’t always be about money, Anne, as there is no person too small to not be able to get by.”

And again, this wasn’t a lesson taught to me by my pop.  But it was a lesson learned that I have thought about, and acted upon, so many times throughout my life.