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9 ‘‘A Possible School’’: The Resurrection of St. Benedict’s Prep, 1972–1977 ‘‘There were guys who said the ship was sinking, and they bailed out,’’ recalled one monk.1 Having just lost fourteen ‘‘brothers’’ to the abbey in Morristown, the monks in Newark walked around a half-empty monastery and a completely empty school. Dazed and disoriented, they did the one thing they could to survive: they jumped in a ‘‘lifeboat.’’ For the first time in over a century the monks on High Street no longer had a common work, so individuals looked for ‘‘outside’’ work to keep the community afloat. Father Melvin Valvano became the chaplain at a nearby hospital. Father Albert Holtz taught French and religion at an all-girl’s Catholic academy. Father Boniface Treanor and Father Theodore Howath taught at local grammar schools. The two youngest monks helped too. Philip Waters drove a delivery truck and Edwin Leahy counseled heroin addicts at a drug rehabilitation center. Other monks continued their studies or looked after duties at the monastery. Through the summer and fall of 1972, they met twice a week to figure out a course for the future. They did not know how, or if, the small community was going to hold together.2 During that uncertain summer, fifteen monks gathered around a massive oval table in the monastery. Father Albert likened it to the size and shape of a lifeboat, with its occupants clinging to the sides, setting out for murky and unchartered waters. In terms of common work, talk teetered from one side of the table to the other as the monks discussed opening a retreat house, a Newman center for local college students, a restaurant, or an adult school. By the end of September, though, the idea of running a high school resurfaced with someone proclaiming at one meeting, ‘‘Look, everybody knows we’re gonna ‘‘a possible school’’ | 191 wind up saying, ‘Let’s run a school,’ so let’s cut the crap and start moving on it!’’ A week later, the soon-to-be ordained Edwin began the community meeting with a typically blunt statement: ‘‘We’re running a school here next year.’’3 Several monks laughed, but Edwin knew that a school was the right thing to try. It certainly made more sense than a retreat house in a riot-torn city. On Thursday, October 12, 1972, the tide turned decidedly toward what came to be called the ‘‘new school venture’’ when the monks voted unanimously to plan for the opening of a school. As other men left the meeting buoyed by the decisive vote, Father Albert lingered in his seat, put his forehead down on the cold tabletop, and moaned. He did not possess the constitution of a risk taker; he was more likely to throw up over the side of the lifeboat than navigate it through stormy seas. He later confessed in his journal: ‘‘We must really be nuts. I ought to know better. But, Melvin just said to me we are forced into things by our values, and this is the essence of freedom.’’ Albert could not be worry-free, though, and he continued to have reservations about opening up a school with limited manpower, zero students, and very little money. The turning point came after a late-night conversation with Father Edwin, who convinced him to put his faith in the new endeavor, and Father Albert later noted: ‘‘This may be the day I look back on and say, ‘I believed beginning that night.’’’4 Others needed less convincing, but after the cataclysmic events of the last five years, it was that they all possess an unflinching faith for the voyage ahead. In June 1972, 123 seniors, most of them white, walked across an auditorium stage to receive the last group of diplomas in the history of St. Benedict’s Prep. Father Albert remembered that as he called out their names, he thought of a funeral. Yet in June 1977, twenty-nine young men, almost all of them African American, glided across the same stage, signaling the end of the pioneering years for the new St. Benedict’s. Supporters pointed to that particular graduation ceremony as a major turning point, a clear sign that the school had completed its ‘‘unique reincarnation.’’ The class of 1977 was the first class to spend four years at the new St. Benedict’s Prep, and although it was officially the 103rd commencement exercises in the school’s...

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