Keeping Faith with the Future
by Lou DiGiorno ’88, School Historian
Last week before morning attendance, freshmen J. R.
Coster and Michael Adair were on their devices figuring
out when the next day off was coming. Ah, such fine
maroon-blooded young Rams. What resourcefulness!
Always planning ahead! [I know what you’re thinking: kids
today, they have it way too easy. Back in our day, we had
to find a real calendar and do mental math to determine
how far off a holiday was. That’s when looking forward to
slacking off was real looking forward to slacking off!]
The calm of the morning was shattered by Coster and
Adair’s shocking discovery: “Um, Mr. DiGiorno, why are
there classes on All Saints Day? Don’t we get the holy days
of obligation off? What unCatholic madness is this?!”
So I set about explaining as Gus Stellwag had explained it
to me — digressions, tangents, asides and all.
In the months leading up to his 2010 retirement, Mr. Gus
Stellwag ’49, longtime school historian, slowly began to
train me as his replacement. As for how Gus came to
choose yours truly as a successor, now that is quite the
tale. It spans three decades and involves two snake plants
from New Rochelle, an arcane arrosoir, the vocatives of
second declension masculine Latin nouns, and the late
Mrs. Louise DiGiorgi, Prep treasurer from the late 1970s
through 1994. [Maybe I’ll make that the last column I write
before I retire. Check in around the time of Fordham’s
bicentennial, God willing.]
Yes, the master’s training did briefly involve a lightsaber
[we have a toy one put away that was confiscated during
the Great Senior Jedi/Sith Battle of Hallowe’en 2008]. But
mostly, it was a slow, careful and decidedly un-epic wade
through over a century and a half of files [and more files,
and more files on top of those.] Now as engaging as daily
attendance records from 1918 can be [stifled yawn], they
were, of course, only a pretense. The real training was
listening to the stories that Gus told along the way. There
were stories from the ‘40s — sometimes the 1940s,
sometimes the 1840s, sometimes both at once — and
from all the years that came before, and from all the years
that came after. They always went the long way around.
No reason to rush to the point without taking the
metaphoric scenic route.
I listened.
It was May by the time we had worked through everything,
including the contents of the old wooden cabinets in
Intermediate Storage. I would never have imagined that
we had eyeglasses from the 1800s in our collection, or
that someone had been mindful enough to store the
coach’s scorebook from Vin Scully’s stint as a Prep
centerfielder. [Pretty cool, huh?]
Upon his retirement, Gus left me with this bit of wisdom
— I jotted down his advice on an index card that
afternoon, and it has been in my top desk drawer ever
since. It went something like this:
Make no mistake. You don’t keep track of the past for
the sake of the past. You keep track of it for the sake
of the future. Otherwise the present wouldn’t know if
it were coming or going! And believe you me, the
present always needs as much help as it can get. It
needed it then, it needs it now and it’ll still need it
when all this is all some tomorrow’s yesterday. It’s
very forward-looking and optimistic, this archiving
business. It’s not all mere sentiment and nostalgia,
you know.
Stellwag’s estimation of legacy and history as more than
simple sentimentality — and in fact, as essential to
institutional survival — is a concept that has been
understood well by many of the men who have been
specifically charged with plotting Fordham future for the
past 175 years — namely the school’s rectors, or as we call
them today, presidents. As early as the 1880s, with
Fordham just approaching its 1891 semicentenary, Father
Rector, the Rev. John Scully, SJ, saw the importance of
taking time to reflecting on the still-young school’s story
theretofore, and commissioned the composition of A
History of St. John’s College, Fordham, N.Y. by Thomas
Gaffney Taaffe, an 1886 Prep grad who would stay on at
Fordham after high school and was working towards his
master’s degree at the time of the jubilee.
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