The Gang’s Almost All Here
Last Saturday, before the in-laws from Georgia and Texas converged on me for our nephew’s nuptial gathering, I had a pre-arranged 50th Reunion Zoom call with my high school class of 1971 from Notre Dame International Preparatory School for Boys, located at the time (it is long since closed down) on the Via Aurelia on the western side of Rome, Italy. NDI, as it was called, was an international school based on the U.S. educational format, taught mostly in English (there was some Italian and some Latin) and run by the Brothers of the Holy Cross of South Bend, Indiana. As a school, it admitted boarding students from around the world and day students who lived in Rome. In those days before the internet, the children of the global expatriate community that were serving time in distant lands from Southeast Asia to Africa and the Middle East often sent their children off to boarding schools in either Switzerland or Rome. I don’t know exactly why those were the spots, but it probably had mostly to do with those being nice places for the parents to visit the kids and perhaps nice places for teachers to live. Certainly Rome was a spot for Catholics to converge and there was a Marymount School for Girls to match the NDI venue for boys. In the late 1960’s there were perhaps four other schools that served that purpose to varying degrees in Rome. There was a French School (name long since forgotten), there was the British system school named St. George’s (what else for a legendary Brit who served as a Roman Legionnaire and thereby traveled the known world), there was a private American prep school called St. Stevens, and there was the ubiquitous Overseas School…of Rome. To my certain knowledge, the schools that had both day students and boarders were NDI, Marymount and St. Stevens. Overseas or OSR was strictly for Day Dogs, as the locals were known (mostly called that by the boarders).
Despite being of Catholic foundation, NDI tried hard to accommodate students of any cultural or religious background so long as they were proficient in the English language. There was a minor distinction in that if you were Catholic or so declared, you were required to take a Religion course (think Catechism). If you were something else, you took an Ethics course. That’s actually pretty funny that they would differentiate. You would think they would try to convert the unwashed, but it seems they were more about creating the impression of being open-minded and non-sectarian than actually being so. The evidence to me in that is that I was a declared baptized Catholic who preferred to not study Catholicism since I was raised Presbyterian. They bought that willingly and were prepared to abandon my soul to the far reaches of situational ethics (interesting analogy now that I think about it). Of course the ethics course was taught by seminarians from the North American Seminary of Rome, so Catholic undertones were never very far removed. The rest of the courses were either taught by Brothers of the Holy Cross who were seconded to the school by their order back in South Bend or by lay teachers who were hired locally. The administration of the school and especially the management of the disciplinary function was always in the hands of the Brotherhood. In fact, they seemed to relish discipline as tends to be the case with the convents and monasteries that abound in the world.
I attended NDI for my last three years of high school. The school covered all the grades from (I think) fourth through twelfth. I suppose there was a young age when even the Brotherhood did not feel they could or should care for the souls of the youngsters, especially since they were less likely to be boarders at that young age and thus the enrollment was more limited. I now wonder what a young family finding itself in Rome did with grade schoolers of the early years? For the first year there I rode to Via Aurelia from EUR, the new section of Rome to the south, on the school bus. After that I had my own transportation, first a Lambretta Scooter and eventually a Triumph TR-6R Tiger 650 motorcycle that I rode to the campus, rain or shine. But three years was enough to become part of the fabric of the school even though some friends like Bob Asselbergs and Glenn LaMuraglia had gone to NDI since the fourth grade. I remember always feeling a mixture of sorrow and envy for the boarding students. I was sorry they were so far from their families and under the thumbs of the Brothers 24×7, but as someone who had spent my Freshman year at a boarding prep school in Maine (Hebron Academy), I also envied them their camaraderie, which I knew developed as a strong force and acted as in loco parentis for them.
Two of the class members, Brent Wolfe (naturally, our class President) and my good friend Tom Wohlmut (class photographer) organized the reunion call. We had a class of fifty-four young men and those guys managed to rustle up fully twenty-three classmates in total, an astounding 43% of the class. Few Universities gather that high a percentage for reunions, and especially 50th Reunions, and super-especially reunions of such a widespread diaspora of students who were not really all part of the same family communities and therefore had much looser social affiliations with one another. We spent two plus hours reminiscing about our life and times with a preponderance of memories from the bad old days on Via Aurelia and the surrounding areas of Rome. To my knowledge, this was the second broad reunion in the fifty years, the first being a 30th year gathering in Las Vegas of about six or seven of us. We met at Caesars Palace, naturally, and kicked around Vegas for a few days doing the same sort of reminiscing, only in person. Given the broad geographical spread of this collection of classmates, it is not hard to understand why a Zoom reunion would get so much better attendance. That is especially so since I know for a fact that several of the attendees were not as mobile as they wish they were…such is the case for all of us aging veterans of the sixties who are just barely in our sixties at this stage of the game.
It is truly amazing how many stories get dredged up and how many different memories and perspectives jive and contrast. Everyone experiences life differently and everyone’s memories come at them in different ways, probably governed to a degree by their circumstances and life experiences from those times until now. There were the global historians, the visual archivists, the international lawyers, the vascular surgeons (yes, Glenn went to Harvard Medical School), the real estate developers (always the real estate developers you can be sure), the bankers, butchers and candlestick makers. Oh yes, and the international arms dealers who could not be present since they were on the lam or some such thing. There was talk of one classmate who was completely off the grid and could not be reached at all. That is saying a lot in a world where 5.3 billion of its 7.8 billion inhabitants, pretty much the entire adult population, have cell phones. Even Mike Cobbold who wintered in the remotest parts of Denali National Park in Alaska for twenty-three years, was on the call sporting his mountain-man beard and his hearty Norwegian sweater.
The gang was almost all there nonetheless. Some are gone and some choose to be absent, which is their God-given right. But for those of us who like staying connected, even if loosely, the things that don’t change are the socialization skills of men like Brent Wolfe and the impish and engaging smile of our class valedictorian, Gerry Pecht. Whether we think we each failed or succeeded in our lives, we will always each have our memories and it is the shared common ground of the most valuable thing any of us can collect, which are friendships. Until next time, guys…