Showing posts with label 2015. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2015. Show all posts

Saturday, November 07, 2015

Leo High School Veterans Observance 2015 - God Bless All Who Serve!

" Busted!" Jim Wilkins '44 showed Darius Branch '16 the 1943 Tribune article showing him ditching classes at Leo to join the Navy in WWII

This year Leo High School corrected a wrong.

17 year old Jim Wilkins ( Leo '44) ditched school during his Junior year at Leo High School ( an act of bravery in itself, given the watchful eyes of the Irish Christian Brothers at that time) and enlisted in the United States Navy.
Jim Wilins is the blond gent in the 1943 Tribune article ( lower Left and Large!) 

From 1943 until the end of WW II, Jim Wilkins served on many combat patrols aboard submarines.

Jim returned from the war and was denied his diploma . . .he did not have enough academic credits.

Then, in a few years, Wilkins went back into the service to fight in the Korean War.

He still did not have enough academic credits to merit a diploma.

Seventy one years later, Leo Alumni President Emeritus Rich Furlong and his heroic brother Jim Furlong who saved his company commander, his squad and his mission by leaping in front of a North Vietnamese hand grenade, sacrificing his left leg in that bloody bargain, heard that Jim Wilkins had been wronged by educators.

The best people who work in schools, really use that term 'educator,' because they are teachers.

There is a huge difference. In my forty years plus of teaching in Catholic high schools, 'educators' are the persons who can not discipline a class, lead kids to learn, or merit the respect of people who do; they become educators.

Teachers teach no matter what their 'academic' job description tags them to be and try to make every experience a learning one.

Yesterday, Leo High School taught Chicago a great lesson.  Credentials mean little.  Capacity means everything.  James Wilkins has capacity a plenty.


Mr. Wilkins and Mr. Jack Schaller ( Leo '43) an Army Purple Heart veteran of New Guinea and the Philippines laid the wreathes at the Leo War Memorial to taps played by Mr. Jim Gould of Bugles Across America.



More than three hundred people including Jim Wilkins family,  four serving combat veterans of Chicago's Own 2/24 Marines, Tinley Park VFW members, eleven combat decorated veterans of Vietnam from the Leo High School Class of 1965, scores of Leo High School veterans of WWII, Korea, Lebanon 1959, Berlin Occupation, Cuban Missile Crisis, Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Grenada, Lebanon 1980's, Desert Storm, Iraq and Afghanistan  and the entire student body of Leo High School witnessed Jim Watkins accept his diploma.

I would like to thank the Chicago Tribune Suburban Branch, ABC 7 Chicago's Ravi  Biachwal, 2/24 Marines, Bugles Across America, Windy City Veterans, Tinley Park VFW Post, Steuber Florists, Pat Roberto of Calabria Imports, Miss Mary T. Burke, Bill Figel '73, the Leo Alumni Association and the Officers of Chicago Police District


Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Jesus Garcia is the Peoples Choice



I am neither scientific nor particularly 'urbane.'  but a poll conducted by N'Digo that is 'not scientific' posts results that will harelip the Mayor and the Governor!   N'Digo warns that it is

NDigo-LogoTag-blue1

Nevertheless, less-than cravenly urbane sophisticates can read N'Digo - free country and all. Rather. People took a poll and here are the results.



The Progressive soaked media want people ( I am a people) to believe that Chuy Garcia is going to beat the dance skins off of Rahm Emanuel come the Resurrection, because of Axelrodian Grassroots websites, Public Sector Unions and medicinal marijuana aficionados.  Not the case.

Chuy Garcia has the support of helots.  Us.  People. Folks with mortgages, paychecks looted by taxes before deposit, kids in school -Catholic schools - skilled trades union dues and the universal contempt and downright antipathy of the Progressive news meda.  We are people walking to the bus and L stops around Chicago wearing Thom McCanns from K-Mart that have been repeated soaked n urine by the likes of Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama, Pat Quinn, Dick Durbin, Richie Daley and their less lights and told it was due to Global Warming - Climate Change - the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District.

Basta Ya!  Enough already.