INDEX
George Carlin
Msgr. J. J. Kowsky
Joseph A.
Fernandez
Terence G. McTigue
Kenny Rankin
George Carlin Didn’t Shun School
That Ejected Him
By DAVID GONZALEZ
Published: June 24, 2008
George Carlin, who died on Sunday at age 71, is not
the most famous graduate of
But Mr. Carlin is without doubt the most famous Hayesman who never graduated.
And 25 years ago, the acerbic comic and well-known
atheist took part in a fund-raising dinner to honor the priest who actually
suggested to young Mr. Carlin that he might want to go to another school. As he
himself noted in his 10-minute riff on the school, you always knew trouble awaited when the priests started calling you
“Mister.”
Mr. Carlin arrived at Hayes in the early 1950s,
part of the class of 1955. But after three semesters, he left the school,
involuntarily, and enrolled — briefly, too — at
Such references would routinely make alumni
(including this writer, class of 1975) shout, “He’s talking about
Hayes!” as any weary spouse can attest. A tape of his 1983 appearance at
the fund-raiser was shared among classmates like underground comedy, and it was
introduced to a new generation last year when the school used it for a fund-raising
video. In it he talks about how Hayes was “the coolest school”
around.
The 1983 fund-raiser was the school’s first
Hall of Fame dinner-dance, and it was to honor Msgr. Stanislaus P. Jablonski, a legendary dean of discipline who was better
known as Jabbo, the Mean Dean and the Sinister
Minister. That Carlin would be chosen to honor the man who kicked him out of a
school that preached a religion he no longer believed in did not go off without
problems. Some in the alumni association feared it would send the wrong
message, said Neil Sullivan, an association member at the time.
“Some of us said Jesus hung out with
sinners,” Mr. Sullivan recalled. “That won out. Maybe this was a
road back for him.”
The comic jumped at the chance to honor Monsignor Jablonski, who had remained close to the Carlin family, Mr.
Sullivan said. And unlike some other past honorees, Mr. Carlin paid his own way
and asked for only one thing — a Hayes baseball jacket.
The 1983 dinner was held not at Hayes’s
then-dicey South Bronx location, but at the archrival Mount St. Michael Academy
in the northern
“What are we doing at the Mount without the
football team?” he started, and off he went. The rest of the routine had
spot-on impersonations of teachers and deans of his era, and wry takes on how
Irish Catholic teenagers coped with life at the button-down, disciplined school
on the Grand Concourse. He captured the hilarity of teenage wiseguys
dreaming up outlandish hypotheticals in religion
class as they tried to stump the priest about what is or isn’t a sin.
Short version: When they trust you enough, sometimes, in some cases, it’s
not a sin.
“Anybody who went to Catholic school at that
time knew somebody like Jabbo,” Mr. Sullivan
said. “And for Carlin to do that routine, a one-shot routine, he had to
have spent countless hours preparing.”
The routine was clean, much to the relief of
nervous administrators at the time. He knew he had made his fame with routines
like the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” and though
his old classmates tried to get him to utter them, he refused. “Hey
Carlin, you going to do the seven words?” he mimicked them in his
routine. “It’s O.K. The priests are liberal!”
His reply, a barnyard epithet, was the only
vulgarity of the night. Monsignor Jablonski, by the
way, seemed to have enjoyed the tribute. At one point the monsignor, a lifelong
New Yorker who died in 2002 at age 86, read from what he said were old
detention slips he had issued to a young George Carlin. One of them seemed
prescient: “He thinks he’s a comedian.”
Carlin’s mini-performance that night never
did become the road back alumni had hoped for. Joe Valenti,
the school’s development director in the 1990s, managed to get to see him
backstage after a show at the Westbury Music Fair. The comedian was generous
with his time, but not his money.
“But he was a total gentleman,” Mr. Valenti said. “By then he had changed, and maybe he
wanted to spare the school embarrassment.”
Hayesmen
continued to claim him as one of their own — besides, his brother,
Patrick, did graduate from the school. And there were tales that he would still
return to the school every now and then.
“He would come up to the front of the school
and he would walk back and forth,” Mr. Sullivan remembered hearing. “Apparently
he went back there to get his thoughts. It brought him back to a certain
time.”
And that jacket he got from the school 25 years
ago? Mr. Sullivan said a former classmate who remained friends with Mr. Carlin
always spotted it in the comic’s dressing room.
“Even though there was kind of a divorce from
the church, his friend brought him Hayes shirts,” Mr. Sullivan said.
“And he still had the jacket.”
This article has
been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction:
June 26, 2008
An article in some editions on Tuesday about the time that the comedian
Msgr. J.J. Kowsky,
66, Police Dept. Chaplain
Published:
September 9, 1988
LEAD: Msgr. John J. Kowsky,
the Roman Catholic chaplain for the New York City Police Department, died,
apparently of a heart attack, Wednesday at his brother's home in
Msgr. John J. Kowsky, the
Roman Catholic chaplain for the New York City Police Department, died,
apparently of a heart attack, Wednesday at his brother's home in Queens. He was
66 years old and lived in
Monsignor Kowsky, who
attended
Monsignor Kowsky's awards
and decrorations included the Legion of Merit and, in
1978, he became the first chaplain to receive the Humanitarian Award from the
Korean Government.
Monsignor Kowsky
supported the death penalty, speaking out at a 1986 luncheon at the Concord
Hotel in the Catskills for delegates at the Police Benevolent Association
convention. The group was endorsing Governor Cuomo, an opponent of the death
penalty, for re-election, and during the invocation Monsignor Kowsky said: ''And for our Governor, just one little thing
he's got to do, Lord. Learn to turn the switch.'' John Cardinal O'Connor will
officiate tomorrow at a 9:30 A.M. service in St. Peter's Rectory at
Surviving is Monsignor Kowsky's
brother, Frederick, retired commander of the police special operations
division.
In Chancellor's Past Drug Use, a Lesson
By
JOSEPH BERGER
Published: December 5, 1992
In a remarkably frank memoir, New York City Schools
Chancellor Joseph A. Fernandez describes how he regularly snorted and injected
heroin for years as a teen-age dropout on the streets of
In the book, Mr. Fernandez, the leader of the
nation's largest school system, appears to cast his drug experience as a
parable of redemption to show how education, in his case the mathematics
classes he took in the Air Force, can save troubled, impoverished youngsters
from the squalid life of the streets.
This particular night we were at somebody's house
and got stoned on some really potent heroin," he writes, in one of the
book's more vivid accounts of drug use. "By the time, we got downstairs to
the streets, we were both reeling. I can barely remember my friends walking us
up and down the sidewalk, trying to keep us from fading out. They probably
saved our lives." Benefits of Second Chance
In several passages, Mr. Fernandez suggests that
the genius of the American educational system, in contrast with
Mr. Fernandez refused yesterday to discuss the book
or to elaborate on it. His spokesman, James S. Vlasto
said that the Chancellor was withholding comment until the book's publication
next month.
The autobiography, "Tales Out
of School: Joseph Fernandez's Crusade to Rescue American Education," will
be published by Little, Brown and Company. Bound proofs have been sent to
reviewers.
Mr. Fernandez also makes some pungent comments
about Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, Mayor David N. Dinkins and other political officials
as well as members of the Board of Education. The 269-page book was written
with John Underwood, who also helped Ted Williams write an autobiography.
The boldness of Mr. Fernandez's remarks are sure to intensify the mystery about whether he will stay
on as Chancellor once his contract expires June 30. He has been mentioned in some
newspaper accounts as a possible candidate to become Secretary of Education in
Bill Clinton's administration.
Mr. Fernandez writes, of Governor Cuomo, that
education "does not appear to be one of his priorities." And he says
Mr. Dinkins too often tackles problems on the basis of the "quick
fix," preferring to spend money on hiring thousands of cops rather than
rooting out the causes of crime by improving schools.
A statement released by City Hall yesterday said
the Mayor would not comment until the book is published in final form and noted
that Mr. Fernandez has recently complimented the Mayor's educational efforts.
Tom Conroy, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, wondered
whether Mr. Fernandez offered "any criticism of himself or is it all the
fault of others that he has not yet achieved what was hoped for him."
Mr. Fernandez says the seven-member Board of
Education is so "politicized" and its actions so
"nettlesome" that he has on occasion "threatened to quit."
He also recalls that he once called Ninfa Segarra, the board's
"This is not the same board that hired
me," he writes. "It may well be the one that fires me."
Struggles With Drugs
The free-ranging book often blends personal
vignettes with Mr. Fernandez's views about education and the
But the book's most startling passages are
personal: his struggles to escape the gangs, drugs and other lures of the
Mr. Fernandez tells how he was born on Dec. 13,
1935, in a ground-floor apartment in East Harlem because his mother, a migrant
from
When Mr. Fernandez was 13, he almost joined a
Dominican religious order, but his parents objected so he returned to the
pleasures of the streets, joining a gang called the Riffs, chasing neighborhood
girls, cutting classes at both
Some of his escapades were pure mischief. One time,
he and his friends pooled their money to buy one youngster a ticket for a
He began smoking marijuana with friends and soon
found himself liking its highs so much that he hogged joints or moved on to
more intoxicating drugs. "You smoked it all yourself," he said.
"And then that wasn't enough, so you started snorting heroin. Then shooting it. Always going for a
little bigger thrill, a little bigger high."
Mr. Fernandez says he was a regular user, but never
quite became an addict. "I thought of myself as a moderate weekend
user," he said, "but soon enough it wasn't uncommon to get high on
Friday night, Saturday night and Sunday night. I was never hooked. I never had
to have it."
He also never got violent when he was high.
"You get violent only when you're hooked and don't have it," he
writes. "With me when I came down, I'd get hungry."
School, when he went, was largely
"irrelevant" to his life, he writes, and his parents were too busy
earning a living to press him to be diligent. He dropped out of both Commerce
and a now-defunct textile vocational high school, and attended a private
"In just a couple of weeks I knew I was too
heavily into drugs to last," he writes of his time at the school.
He spent much of his time in a neighborhood
recreational center, using drugs nearby. "The guys didn't do drugs there,
but sometimes we would shoot up across the street in the park," he writes.
Encouraged by Others
Meanwhile, his girlfriend, Lily Pons, who
eventually became his wife and the mother of his four children, implored him to
"get a life." And a state counselor, recognizing his academic talent,
urged him to try college. But he chose to enlist in the Air Force, using some
cocoa cream to conceal the needle marks on his arms from recruiters.
"As it turned out, I was not yet out of the
woods with drugs," he writes, "but I was on my way to being an
educated man. My emancipation."
At Air Force bases here and overseas, there were
plenty of opportunities to use drugs. Then, on a visit home, he almost
succumbed to an overdose. He and a friend "shot up in
the kitchen" of his parents' home. "Before I could get
downstairs, I suddenly felt myself losing control -- that terrifying downward
spiral toward unconsciousness," he writes.
One night, at a base in
What saved him from a dead-end life was the success
he began to feel in the mathematics courses he took. He got his high school
equivalency degree in the service and enrolled at
In
Many observers, he writes, argue that American
schools are paying too high a price for educating "scholastic duds."
But Mr. Fernandez writes that "you can never tell about potential"
and he believes in encouraging programs like government loans and veteran
incentives.
"See it from my experience," he writes.
"A high school dropout going nowhere, who nevertheless was picked up again
and again by the system and finally allowed to make it through. Yes, I worked
hard for it once I saw the light. But the system made it possible."
From the New York Times, a story about Terence G. McTigue
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/nyregion/10laguardia.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=nyregion
Regarding Kenny Rankin
After receiving an email from Don Greeley and a few others,
I decided to find more information about him.
From the articles, I have deduced that he was born February
10, 1940 - June 7, 2009 and therefore he should have graduated from Bishop
Dubois with either the class of 1957 or 1958 but he did not.
He was from the
Kenny Rankin attended BDHS for a period of time but did not
graduate. I know this because he told me so a few months ago when he was
in
I told him that I read on the BDHS website that he
graduated from there. It was like striking a raw nerve.
He mentioned one brother and some priests who "used to
beat the s*** out of me." He said he would have graduated in 1957 if
he had continued. I told him to enjoy his stay in
Jerry Kreinik, '59
Kenny Rankin's picture is in my l955 year book, p.
42. He was a great singer and guitarist.
Moved back to
George Febles, '58
Kenny’s web site
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenny_Rankin
News regarding his death
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-kenny-rankin9-2009jun09,0,5347669.story
http://music.msn.com/music/article.aspx?news=413374