There are several “Rocky” legends out there in popular culture today. There’s Rocky Balboa, Sylvester Stalone’s underdog prizefighter from Philadelphia; there’s Rocky and Bullwinkle of cartoon fame; and then there’s the Rocky Horror Show (less said the better). But I have another Rocky story, and this one is true. It’s about a guy named Rocky Locarro who was the janitor in the public elementary school that I went to.
My own “Rocky story” isn’t much of a story at all, actually. Rocky didn’t do anything that captured the attention of the local newspaper, much less the national media. He didn’t commit any horrendous crimes against the children who were around him all day; he wasn’t a brilliant scholar or musician making a living mopping up classroom floors; and he wasn’t the chieftain of some crime syndicate working undercover. He didn’t even drink or fall asleep while on the job. Rocky was just another working class guy of Italian ethnic heritage who lived in town, had a home, raised a family, did his job, and died rather quietly a few years after retiring.
What made Rocky special wasn’t something that you could see back when you knew him. He was definitely the kind of guy that you took for granted. He was always there, emptying the class trash baskets, moping up puke, cleaning the boy’s urinals, keeping an eye on the boiler so that the classrooms were always warm in January and February (and they always were). He didn’t take many days off. If you needed something from your desk during Christmas or Spring break, all you had to do was to go down to the school and bang on the door around 10 am. Rocky would let you in and you would soon have what you needed.
What really made Rocky special was that he was a consistently nice guy. He sometimes had to yell at kids when they “got stupid”; i.e., when they started manifesting that charming combination of poor judgment and petty malevolence that’s inherent to youth (especially youth from ethnic working-class towns back in the unenlightened early 1960s). He didn’t push his niceness on anyone; he wasn’t trying to prove his virtue at every little opportunity. He didn’t have a big bright smile or an outgoing personality. He had a small, almost odd looking little body, not exactly the kind of person you’d want to hug. But he had a certain combination of empathy and sympathy for every kid, along with a lot of patience. You knew that Rocky would not hassle you any more that he had to. If he could give you a break, he would. By fourth or fifth grade, when you started to “turn cool”, he’d go along with your desire to assert your status (however undeserved) by calling an adult by his first name. If he was coming down the hall and you and your 10 year old friends said “hi, Rocky”, it was no problem; he’d give you a nod or a quick “hi” in return. Try that with a teacher or principal and you were in for some major blah-blah; it was MISTER, MISSUS, or MISS (no “MS” back in those days).
Back in my elementary school years, they didn’t have Ritalin or mandatory special education programs. Nonetheless, we did have a troubled, hyperactive student who bounced back and forth between grades and was occasionally referred to some special school in a distant town. There were a couple of other tough-guy troublemakers who didn’t get along well with the teachers. Rocky seemed to be the one guy who could talk to these unsettled kids (even though he had to chide them about smoking in the boy’s room). I can’t say if Rocky changed their lives. Some of them settled down and had productive adulthoods, and some didn’t. But Rocky was the only adult that they could talk to. He was also nice to the weaker, nerdy kids (like me). And to the average kids. Rocky was basically nice to everyone.
In addressing the economic problems and segregation awareness of American blacks in the 1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that even if a man is just a street sweeper, he should push himself to be the best street sweeper possible. As with so much of what Dr. King said, this injunction can now be interpreted more broadly across all of humankind. Rocky Locarro was just an elementary school janitor, and yet he was also the best school janitor possible. To a large degree, he would be commended for what he was not: he wasn’t a child molester, a drunk, a slacker, or a tyrant. But he is also forgotten for what he wasn’t: he wasn’t a man of ideas, he wasn’t an entrepreneur, he wasn’t a politician, he wasn’t rich, he wasn’t a world-class athlete, he wasn’t a major artist, he wasn’t a “mover and a shaker”. And that’s a shame, because Rocky was one of those rare people who made life easier for most everyone around him. If there were more like him, there would surely be fewer wars, less crime, fewer lawsuits, better government, and a whole lot more trust and cooperation between people.
They say that capitalism, with all of its wondrous by-products (high tech gadgets, entertaining athletics and culture, sexy fashions, etc.), requires egocentric greed to function. If everyone were like Rocky Locarro in terms of ego, then maybe we wouldn’t have miniature cell phones and wide screen TVs and the Super Bowl and negative political ads and JenLo or Beyonce whomever the pop queen is at present. We’d have a plainer, more dowdy world where everyone was a whole lot more decent and respectful to one another. I, for one, would be willing to trade some consumer electronics and some entertainment culture for a few million more people like Rocky. “It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.” That seems like a trite statement, but if you knew a guy like Rocky Locarro, you’d realize that it’s a radical formula for a better world.