Remarks by Daughter Jeanne Judge Umana 071019

REMARKS OF JEANNE UMANA - REDEDICATION OF MARIO UMANA MIDDLE SCHOOL ACADEMY, OCTOBER 19, 2007

The dedication of a school is a very scrupulous process. It is an honor bestowed by a community in consideration of its most precious resource - its children. It begs the question: whom do we want them to emulate? When they write
their papers, and, - after their name - where they attend school, when they walk through the front doors and look up at the name on the building every day from September to June, from the beginning of their matriculation until the day that they graduate, whom do we want to inspire them? There is a reason we use the term “alma mater” - meaning nurturing mother. A school is a surrogate parent, nurturing a sense of community and belonging and culture, as well as intellect, and spirit and character. My father always considered it a privilege to have his name forever linked to their progress, to be part of their lives forever.

I have many people to thank for their generous assistance and patience with me in wading through this naming process. Mayor Thomas Menino and former Sen. Pres. Robert Travaglini, both of whose enthusiasm and support gave this project wings. Councillor Sal LaMattina, who so expertly shepherded us through its intricacies and protocol, former School Supt. Contimpassas and the School Committee for their unanimous approval, and very much the principal of this school, Dr. Jose Salgado who has turned the Umana/Barnes, with the assistance of his dedicated faculty and staff, from a school struggling to find its way into one that is a national model for other middle schools and which proudly warrants the new name Mario Umana Middle School Academy.

There are many other friends and neighbors to thank for helping to realize this event - my father’s friend and political ally, former Mayor Kevin White, Jim Kearney, Pat O’Brien, Jane Manning, Ros Avant, Kathy Venuti, Christine Buttiglieri and all the other staffmembers of this school for organizing this event, Judge Joseph Ferrino for his guidance and encouragement, Fran Riley and the Board of Directors of the Harborside Community School for their endorsement, Mr. Vincent Caristo, Mr. Anthony Albano, my father’s former law partner and friend Ted Anzalone and his gracious wife Joanne, Helen Chin Schlichte, our neighbors the Cascios, the Rowans, the Shermans and a very special thank you to my cousins Dolly and Lorrie Ann whose artistic talents and floral displays are a treausure to behold, Donna and Ann Patricia, and particularly Mario Umana, my father’s namesake, for his unflagging, quiet, and always unselfish diligence and concern for our family and this school, and not least of whom, my mother, whose devotion to my father and her family has never wavered and will continue until her last breath. Of course, my sister Anne and her husband Ned, and my precious husband Reid, whose patience with me the last two years has been legendary.

And, lest I forget, we owe today to the foresight and dogged persistence of another Umana, my father’s brother and alter ego Guy, against whose persistence mine is that of a mere rookie and who a little more than 30 years ago knew that no honor better suited his family’s contribution to East Boston than this school bearing his brother’s name - not a bridge, nor a street, not an office building, nor a park - but a school, the same entity that nurtured Dad’s promise and future ambitions.

Indeed, it was a little more than 30 years ago, on a cold night in December, when Mario Umana stood before a similar gathering in this same auditorium, humbled and grateful for this honor. In 1976, Boston - the Athens of America, this city upon a hill, as Governor John Winthrop called it, the birthplace of free and mandatory public education - was steeped in the brutal challenges of federal receivership of its school system as well as forced busing. The Mario Umana Harbor School of Science and Technology was designated a magnet school, in the truest sense of the word, drawing students and faculty of all races from all over the city, creating local partnerships with the likes of MIT and Massport. It was the realization of a dream, forged by architects of compromise as well as concrete.

Long after we leave through these doors today, hundreds of students will enter through them. Many will ask the questions: who was this Mario Umana, what did he do, and why did they put his name up there? The first thing I would tell them is this: It was no accident that this school and the man came together in 1976 as brethren of compromise, for that was my father’s forte - bringing people to the table of consensus. He was not a fortress in selfish defense of his own political survival or personal agenda, but a bridge spanning the troubled waters of his time, as well as uniting groups of all ethnic and mental persuasions - be they Yankee or Irish, Jewish or Italian, black or Hispanic, Harvard professor or Jeffries Point constituent. He thrived over the years by virtue of all their support and valued his associations with all of them. What my father sought was the connection, up close and personal. What he valued was the cameraderie, belonging to something meaningful. In 1964, when he ran for Lieutenant Governor, at the eleventh hour at the Democratic convention in Agawam, he lost to the political machine, even though he had received endorsements and commitments from the majority of the delegates. After silencing all of us who had followed him to the brink of victory and screamed, “No, don’t give up,” against Johnnie Powers’ pounding of the gavel, Dad quieted us and said simply, “I will abide by the party’s wishes because a house divided against itself cannot stand.” If the Democrats had heeded his admonition that year, they wouldn’t have presented a splintered ticket to the electorate for the primary, thereby electing a Republican governor named John Volpe, a very nice man who happened to be Italian. They wouldn’t have wandered in the proverbial desert for ten years under the yoke of a Republican administration until Mike Dukakis could break the monopoly in 1974.

I would tell these students, from the day he was born at 76 Everett Street in 1914 to the day he died on 17 Thurston Street in 2005, Dad lived here in East Boston among people he loved and needed, and that during that lifetime he was a natural fighter - whether in the ring at Harvard as a featherweight champ or in the Senate chambers until all hours of the day and night. He was armed with inate skills as well those acquired from the Boston school system, Harvard College and Harvard Law. Unlike wealthy bondholders from New York who underwrote Massport’s ravenous efforts to reduce East Boston and Winthrop to mere runways, my Dad fought with the artillery of reason and the law, fairness and ethics, not money or high-powered public relations. He did it above board, always with dignity tempered by guts, beholden to no special interests or PAC committees, but only to the twin angels of his constituency and his conscience. For him, the purpose of power was to empower others, to drink moderately at the wellspring, but never become so intoxicated that he lost sight of who empowered him to speak for them.

I would tell them when he was going to drop out as a high school junior in the wake of his father’s premature death, his French teacher Miss Adams at E.B. High literally went to his mother and yanked him back in. She wouldn’t let him off the hook, drilling him for months after school to take the Harvard entrance exams. The whole week before, he practiced the route by train every day from Maverick to Harvard, finding his way to where the test would be given so he could focus on only one thing - validating his teacher’s and family’s faith in him by passing the exam, and pass he would, time and again throughout his whole life. That motif of passing tests and facing down obstacles was lodged in his brain. He was, after all, the astronaut for so many others’ dreams.

I would tell them that he never stopped trying to justify other’s faith in him. With the moral clarity that study under the likes of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead gave him, as well as the likes of his own mother, called with reverence Don Antonetta, his ethical compass never wavered. He was just one of those people who always seemed to get it right, able to traffick successfully in, among and in spite of the grey areas of politics, and there are many among us today who know how hard this can be. He was one of a privileged group in his generation who were statesmen as well as politicians - a statesman in that politics for him was always second to the common good, but a politician in that he was realistic enough to know you couldn’t be one without the other. And make no mistake, he relished politics, because he relished being among people. Everyone was a new experience. Even at my wedding in California, among a bastion of my husband’s Republican friends, he worked the room like a pro, charming them over with the force of his personality.

I would tell them that as a legislator and finally a judge, at the heart of it he cared. Deeply. About people, as well as ideology, about promoting the ideals of good governance as well as not sacrificing the people that abstract ideals were meant to help. Balance was the hallmark of his brilliance - he measured his words and his stances, his decisions, and the results of those decisions, his power and his responsibilities, his head against his heart, more often than not favoring the latter. On the way to Democratic national convention in Chicago in 1968, when everyone was in a festive mood boarding the plane, boasting political bravado and sporting party hats, my Dad realized something was out of balance. He quietly said, “Look, there’s a war going on and children are dying. We should take off the hats and tone it down.”

In the year 2007, they no longer call it busing, but diversity. However, as Shakespeare said, a rose by any other name. We still face the provocative question, how do we human beings get along? My father’s last words that night in this auditorium in1 976 give us an entree to his answer - “the blood of all - red, white and black - is equally red.” Pragmatic, simple, eloquent, perceptive, fair, just like him.

I hope I have addressed these students’ questions of the future. And having done so, I also hope they will write his name under their own with pride, and say “I wish I had known this Mario Umana,” an honor I and many of you with us today have had and I trust will always treasure. In closing, on behalf of my entire family, and particularly my Dad, I thank all of you for helping us to keep alive the essence of what my father stood for, fought for and believed in, as well as his enduring bond with this community, his beloved East Boston.