Giovanni Pellegrino Campana would have been 104 just 11 days prior to this Father's Day. That name
is on his birth certificate, but we knew my father as John Pilgrim Campana. Born on 6 June 1914, the son of Italian immigrants Consiglia and Domenico Campana, who arrived on these shores from Naples, Italy, in the late 1890s.
The family settled in Boston, where my father grew up playing baseball, ice hockey, but most of all, studying. He attended Boston Latin School, the oldest and arguably still the best high school in the USA.
After that, it was off to the oldest college in the USA, Harvard, where he graduated summa cum laude with a degree in history in 1936. In those days, Harvard was not a hospitable place for Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, or Jews. Forget about Latinos or African-Americans; it was the bastion of WASPs - White (or Wealthy) Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
He loved playing hockey - he was a right winger - but didn't play for Harvard after his freshman year. He told me that the rich kids on the team would rent one of the indoor arenas for practices that were restricted to themselves and their friends. So while he worked, they practiced and he fell behind. When he told me this, there was nary a trace of bitterness in his voice. That's just the way it was.
But his true sports love was baseball. He played shortstop and pitcher on the Harvard
team till he graduated in 1936. I have a team ball signed by all the players on the 1936 team, with the inscription: Harvard - 3, Yale - 0.
He married 'Southern belle' (North Carolina)
Ruth Ellen Emerson in 1943 and they had three children. They first lived in Manhattan, then moved out to Queens, and finally, headed to the Long Island suburbs in December 1951, where they remained until 1978., retiring to Mooresville, North Carolina.
He started teaching in the New York City school system in 1938, a career that spanned 36 years, 26 of which were spent at Brooklyn's Erasmus Hall High School, the nation's second-oldest high school. He taught history and political science and coached golf and bowling. In those days, EHHS was one of the nation's best. Its top students won scholarships to the USA's finest universities. As I grew up, I remember many visits from former students who would drop by to thank him for all he had done. They told me what a remarkable teacher and man he was and how much he had helped them.
Many of his students in those days were Jewish students from the Flatbush section. Their parents were not wealthy but small shopkeepers and homemakers. Yet their children routinely won scholarships to the Ivy League schools. I recall one of them who ranked 100th in his senior class but won a free ride to Princeton. My father was so proud of them - he knew they still faced the discrimination he had known in the 1930s. He had some famous students - Barbra Streisand and Bobby Fischer were among them. How about
Kenny Vance? Listen to him sing
'Looking for an Echo' (skip to 1:15 if you don't want to wait). Kenny was one of the founders of Jay and the Americans.
He left EHHS in 1964 to help open Canarsie High School in Brooklyn. He was the Assistant Principal, a position that earned him more money but meant no more teaching. That was a tough call for him.
His time at CHS was difficult - an unreasonable boss and trouble from the start. In those days, the races and ethnicities mixed worse than they do today. On some days scores of NYPD officers patrolled the halls and grounds. When a chair whizzed by his head during a cafeteria free-for-all, he knew it was time to retire. That was 1974.
The photo was taken a few years before he left CHS.
My father was an inveterate and prolific letter-writer. He would write letters to all kinds of people: political leaders, heads of state, CEOs, editors, sports figures, et al. At the time of his death he was working on a book titled, One Small Voice, a collection of his letters. His favorite target was Tom Yawkey, then the owner of his beloved but then-incompetent Boston Red Sox. He would instruct Yawkey on whom to trade, whom to release, etc. He reminded Yawkey that he was losing black players to other teams (the Red Sox were one of the last teams to integrate). It was a futile exercise, of course, but he enjoyed it. One of my big regrets in life was seeing him die in 1984, before the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004, 2007 and 2013. But at least he did not witness the 1986 debacle. That surely would have killed him. My father's devotion to the Sox and their history still has an impression on me: although I am a Yankees fan, there is a soft spot in my heart for the Red Sox.
He worked summers serving as a golf instructor at summer camps or running camps supplying caddies for resort hotels - The Balsams and Mount Washington hotels in New Hampshire. Because of him I have a love for the Granite State's White Mountains, where I caddied at the Maplewood Hotel - the same place he caddied in the late 1920s - early 1930s.
I often wonder how the Internet would have appeared to him. Given his love for writing and commentary, would he have become a blogger? Somehow I doubt it. He was committed to letters.
He was remarkable man. A student of history, language, politics, sports, chess, and more. He was small in stature and an unlikely athlete. Baseball, hockey, golf, bowling, and tennis were his games.
I know for sure what he would think of our current President!
Whatever my talents are as a scholar, mentor, and teacher I owe to him. Likewise for what it means to be a man. He was so proud when I received my PhD. He had an ABD (all but dissertation) from Fordham - marriage and a family intevened - and he never finished. He would have made quite a professor!
At the end of my freshman year in college he even took my announcement that I wanted to be a disk jockey with uncustomary tranquility. Well, sort of....
I miss you, Dad; I think of you each day. You're my role model.
But I think the Yankees will beat out your Sox this year. And what happened to the Bruins this year?
"Democracy is like a raft; you're safe, but your feet get wet." -- John P. Campana
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