discussed him before<\/a> on this blog). He was the janitor at McKenzie Elementary School in Carlton Hill (East Rutherford, NJ). Rocky was a short fellow of slight build, but he was healthy enough to keep the floors mopped and the wastebaskets clean. He was there whenever a kid puked or a toilet overflowed because someone stuffed it with towels. He didn’t take any crap from the kids; when someone tried to give him trouble, he immediately gave it back. He would yell, and if pushed enough, he might even hit someone; that’s how kids were dealt with back then. (To clarify, the hitting that adults did to kids where I came from was to humiliate them, not to injure them). When kids were acting stupid (which I did on various occasions), he called them out and warned them to stop it. If they didn’t (and usually they did), he could get tough. <\/p>\nBut actually, I rarely remember Rocky having to do that. Because he also liked the kids. He would talk to kids without a lot of pretensions or attitudes. He was a parent himself, and he treated all of the 300 or so kids in my grammar school pretty much like they were his own kids. At bottom, he liked all the kids and wanted them to do well. Rocky was like everyone’s best uncle. He didn’t get angry quickly, or bitch and moan about things. During an Easter vacation break, I once had to go over to the school to get something, maybe it was a coat, that I left at my desk. So I banged on the door of the closed school one morning, and Rocky came by and took me up to the classroom, where I found what I needed. No drama; he was nice about the whole thing. <\/p>\n
Rocky was a man of unspoken values and unapparent virtue. If you asked him what his values were, he probably could not have told you, not in any great detail anyway. He wasn’t a philosopher or a social theorist. He probably went to church, probably had some regard for the notion of sin and eternal punishment. But at bottom, he was moral by osmosis. He reflected some mix of genetics and social circumstances and life experiences that came together to form a truly good man. His goodness rubbed off on others, including the many kids that passed through the school through the course of his career. With enough adults like him around (and there were other good guys around), most kids could grow up to be positive, moral people themselves. I can’t think of anyone from my class who turned out to be a criminal or a depressed suicidal maniac or a sociopath (or an options broker on Wall Street; also pretty bad). We mostly turned out pretty average, but generally responsible citizens. Something of Rocky had soaked into many of us.<\/p>\n
OK, I’m not saying that Rocky turned us into saints. I’m sure if I did a closer study of the kids who went thru McKenzie School who remember Rocky, I could find some bad apples. But to be honest, it is hard today to find solid, simple people of value. We are all so complex these days. We have intelligent idiots like Glenn Beck held up as the poster children for conservative ideals. What we really need to seek are people like Rocky Locarro. If the Tea Party could guarantee us a handful of Rocky Locarros in every school, then I might agree with them that government regulations and involvement in our lives (and the taxes needed to fuel such involvement) could be cut back. But alas, they cannot.<\/p>\n
Our nation and our society does need to try to get back to some of the simple and basic ways of people like Rocky Locarro. There isn’t any pill or psychological technique to turn out folk like that. The Baby Boom generation seemed to have lost the unwritten social formula for it, the unwritten notions of living that made \u201cthe Greatest Generation\u201d pretty great after all (although yes, they had their problems with racism and homophobia). Let’s hope that succeeding generations eventually come across it again. Otherwise \u2013 it’s going to keep on getting uglier and uglier (despite all our enlightenment regarding racial and sexual equality).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As I get older, I give conservatives (the true conservatives, anyway) credit for putting emphasis on the notion of \u201cvalues\u201d and “virtues”. They have a point; no matter how good and effective the government is, no matter how extensive its social programs are, no matter how just and effectively enforced the laws are, a nation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,6,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1777"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1777"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1777\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5331,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1777\/revisions\/5331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}