Every once in awhile, when I’m out and about - filling the van with gas, filling the van with groceries - I’ll be greeted in a manner I’ve not heard in a while: “Coach Jim!” “Cubmaster Jim!”
When I look up to see who is extending this greeting, it is always a young adult - and rarely one I recognize.
In general, this person calling out to me is someone I’ve not seen in 10, 15, going on 20 years.
And now they’re all grown up, unrecognizable to me, but except for being a bit grayer and a bit rounder, I suppose I’ve not changed as much in the intervening years, and so they recognize me and want to say hi.
For this, I am always grateful.
And if I don’t recognize them right away, they usually can tell - and will remind me of their name.
Sometimes that doesn’t even actually register in my memory - but that I never admit to. I repeat their name, say (truthfully) how glad I am to see them, and ask how they’re doing.
The fact is that in some two decades of volunteering at various Boys & Girls Clubs, the YMCA, Little League and fast-pitch softball, I coached hundreds of kids. I don’t remember all of them, at least not by name - and the faces have lost their childhood baby fat, and so those no longer register in my brain either. (As Cubmaster of a small pack for four years, I didn’t have quite as many kids - and I remember almost all of them, as well as the couple dozen students I had teaching an upper-division journalism course at Point Loma Nazarene for seven years.)
Still, that I was able to leave some kind of positive impact on them - to where they at least want to say hi when they see me - is gratifying.
Because Lord knows I haven’t been perfect in my coaching or Scouting.
This rule of mine of never admitting I don’t remember a kid who I once coached is one I am happy to report I did not learn the hard way - because that would have entailed disappointing or hurting one of these young people.
Instead, it was imparted to me on my last day of high school - by the second teacher who ever entered my life (my mother, a former elementary school teacher, obviously having the inside track there).
Brother Joseph Trageser - my grandfather’s younger brother - passed away 25 years ago this Aug. 11 at the age of 93. He taught high school math and music in Catholic schools in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York for more than 70 years, and had thousands of students come through his classes over the decades.
When I graduated high school in Dayton, Ohio, in 1979, Uncle Joe was teaching at Cincinnati Moeller. While he never learned to drive, Uncle Joe was a master at getting the younger priests and religious brothers to ferry him about, and so he was at my graduation at U.D. Arena that day.
At the end of the ceremony, as my father, Uncle Joe I were walking out into the parking lot toward our car, we heard someone shouting from a distance - all I could make out was “Trageser.”
I looked over to see the boys’ dean of students, Mr. DeBrosse, running after us. In our naive teen-age minds, most of my fellow students and I considered Mr. DeBrosse the meanest, coldest, most heartless man on the face of the earth - and we all hated him with a deep and very un-Christian passion wholly inappropriate for a Catholic high school. I hadn't been in trouble of late, though, and couldn't figure out why Mr. DeBrosse, who hardly ever even granted me the courtesy of simple acknowledgment, could want with me - especially now, as I clutched my diploma tightly, fearful that he would even yet snatch me back into his dark and powerful clutches.
As it turned out, Mr. DeBrosse wanted nothing from me. "Brother Trageser," he asked Uncle Joe breathlessly. "Is that you?" Mr. DeBrosse was winded from chasing us into the parking lot, but clearly excited. "It's me - Ronnie!"
Ronnie? Ronnie? It had never occurred to any of us that Mr. DeBrosse even had a first name, let alone "Ronnie."
"Ronnie DeBrosse. I played tuba for you at Chaminade." I looked over at Uncle Joe, and he clearly had no idea who on earth could be this middle-aged man so eager to make Brother Joe proud.
But it was just as clear that to have admitted as much would have crushed Ronnie DeBrosse, tubaist from the class of '59, and so Uncle Joe did what he always did and made Mr. DeBrosse - the once-feared authority figure who had finally let one of his students know he was human after all - feel like he was the most special pupil in Joe Trageser's life.
And Uncle Joe was proud. Even if he couldn't remember exactly who this was, this was one of his boys, grown up into a good and decent man, a teacher like himself no less. "Ronnie DeBrosse, of course! Look at you! Well, it's good to see you!"
And as they walked off a few feet to catch up, Mr. DeBrosse, dean of boys at Archbishop Karl J. Alter High School, scowling disciplinarian extraordinaire, a man who never showed any emotion at any time, well, he beamed. Yes, beamed. Smiling, waving his arms, telling Brother Joe all he'd done in the 20 years since he'd last seen his teacher. In my youthful ignorance, I wouldn't have guessed it possible. But then, I'd underestimated the impact Brother Joe had on people. And of course, looking back now, more than 40 years since that day, older now than Mr. DeBrosse was then, I realize Uncle Joe's perspective was accurate: Mr. DeBrosse was exactly the man my uncle thought he was: a decent and kind man trying to keep reign on 600 hormone-pumped teen-age boys - a job I wouldn't care to tackle, thank you very much.
After he and Uncle Joe had talked, Mr. DeBrosse came over to congratulate me. "Well, I guess the last name of Trageser should have tipped me off, but I never would have guessed you were related to Brother Joe."
I never saw Mr. DeBrosse after that day - he didn’t attend any of our class reunions with other faculty, and he passed away a few years ago after a long and fruitful life.
But I remember him and Uncle Joe every time somebody calls out “Coach Jim” - and I like to think that if Mr. DeBrosse had met me in the intervening years, he might have said he saw a bit of Brother Joe in me.
When I was teaching at PLNU, I was in the faculty lounge one day checking my mail (even adjunct faculty receive a surprising - perhaps disturbing - number of brochures encouraging you to assign this or that textbook to your class next semester) when a professor who was a few years older than me came over and saw the mail slot I was perusing.
Only being on campus one day a week, I didn’t know many of the other faculty, and so she said, “Oh, you must be Jim Trageser.”
When anyone pronounces the family name correctly, it always gets my attention.
I admitted that I was, in fact, me, and then she asked if I was related to a Brother Joe Trageser.
I told her he was my dad’s uncle - at which point I learned that he had taught her older brother math in high school, and that her brother always spoke of Uncle Joe as his mentor.
About five years ago, when I was still working as a field rep for the local council of the Boy Scouts, I learned that one of my longtime volunteers had, in fact, accumulated more than 74 years in Scouts as both a youth member and an adult volunteer - that, except for an abbreviated one-year mission (he is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) he had been involved in Scouting from the age of 7!
So we nominated him for the 75-year BSA service award. His wife provided the documentation, BSA headquarters in Texas found or had struck a 75-year pin (not too many of those handed out!), and his adult children organized a dinner celebration at the local LDS ward.
During the presentation, the president of his stake made an observation I have carried since:
“When we serve others, we create ripples like a pebble thrown in a pond. They may be small, we may not see where they go, but they exist and they affect others.”
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