2014 Prep Hall of Fame Program

Professional Achievement and Service Awards

October 9, 2014 | Mayfair Farms | West Orange, New Jersey

It’s our turn to be proud of you, Dad. We love you Big Mike!

Myung Margot Michael Megan

2014 Professional Achievement and Service Awards Master of Ceremonies Bob Colacurcio, ’73 t Invocation and Welcome t George Krol, ’74

Professional Achievement Award

Billy Bludgus, ’01

Young Alumnus Award

Bishop John Flesey, ’60

Professional Achievement Award

Paul Colford, ’71, P’09

Professional Achievement Award

Leo Cullum, ’59†

Professional Achievement Award

John Feeney, ’80

Br. Paul Harrison, S.J. Spirit of Prep Award

Mike Ring, ’57

Ernie Baker, ’38 Community Service Award

t Pride & Glory

†

posthmous induction.

George Krol, ’74 Professional achievement Award From Saint Peter’s Prep to St. Petersburg, Russia, perhaps a career in diplomacy was preordained for George Krol. After all, while it’s now common for Prep students to descend upon Grand & Warren from all directions each morning, a Clifton resident on campus in the early ’70s was like an emissary from an exotic land.

He went on to graduate magna cum laude with a degree in history from Harvard, and earned additional degrees in philosophy, politics and economics from Mansfield College at Oxford University. After one year in the publishing industry, George turned his attention to the U.S. Foreign Service, beginning as vice consul and economics officer in Warsaw, Poland.

He has served in many capacities since that first assignment in 1982, both abroad and in Washington.

He had a front-row seat for the collapse of the Soviet Union as he served as political/ economic officer for the United States Consulate in Leningrad/St. Petersburg. His assignments since then have focused exclusively on the post-Soviet space and post-Soviet issues, including appointments as ambassador to Belarus (2003-06) and to Uzbekistan (2011-present), stationed in Tashkent. He is the ambassador-designate to Kasakhstan, having been nominated to that post this year.

Ambassador Krol married fellow foreign service officer Melissa Welch in 2009, and together they intend to settle eventually in her home state of Rhode Island, to teach in the field of foreign relations. He credits Prep for his “learning how to think critically under history teacher Mr. Michael Gray. He and other memorable teachers such as Mr. Anthony Stone...sparked an interest in foreign affairs that became my life’s work and passion.”

Billy Bludgus, ’01 Young Alumnus Award This Bayonne native has called many places home since becoming an alumnus. But wherever he has gone, service has shaped his path. After graduating from the University of Miami he accepted a position with the Jesuit Volunteers and was missioned to Loyola High School in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to teach math, science, and English while coordinating the school’s retreat and service programs. During that time Billy also founded The House of Blue Hope, a non-profit organization which transitions street children into schools while providing a safe living and learning environment and basic needs. Over the past seven years, dozens of kids have successfully completed House of Blue Hope programs and have gone on to college. Billy was recognized with a Jefferson Award for Public Service from the state of New Jersey for his work in Tanzania.

In 2008, he joined the staff of Loyola School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and went on to spend six years as Director of Christian Service. His duties included coordinating the school’s service outreach efforts, immersion trips and service-learning social justice curricula, while teaching classes in both the math and theology departments. In his “spare time,” he taught math at Xavier High School’s Higher Achievement Program, returned to Tanzania for several weeks each summer, completed a master’s degree at Fordham as well as a two-year Ignatian Spirituality and Leadership Program with the Jesuit Collaborative, and spent four years on the advisory board for All Saints Catholic Academy in Bayonne, NJ, chairing their finance committee. His leadership as Class Chair has helped the Class of 2001 stand out of one of Prep’s most dedicated classes of alumni year after year.

Billy’s path of service took a new turn this year, to California. He is now Dean of Student Engagement and Support at the new Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in San Jose.

Most Rev. John Flesey, ’60 Professional achievement Award In May of 1960, a Prep senior addressed his fellow students on a hot day in the old schoolyard. The topic was “Is Mary Really Our Mother?” and, 54 years later, that student speaker would recall the weary faces of “Prepsters who looked at me like I was slightly crazy.”

But he was undeterred from a life of service to his faith and his neighbors.

“For me, the truths we professed in our faith and the realities we celebrated in our liturgy were real and led me to a personal life of prayer,” Bishop Flesey reflected.

After his ordination in 1969, he would go on to share that faith with the parish community of Saint Bernard’s in Plainfield for 14 years. In hopes of better serving the community, he attained a masters’ degree in counseling in 1974. Following graduate studies in Rome – culminating in the opportunity to concelebrate Mass with Pope John Paul II after his doctoral defense – he returned Stateside to the Immaculate Conception Seminary at Seton Hall University, serving variously as rector, spiritual director and director of formation.

Since 2004, the year of his ordination as an Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Newark, Bishop Flesey has served as pastor of Most Blessed Sacrament parish in Franklin Lakes.

Throughout his 45-year ministry as a priest, he has been highly regarded for his good counsel, his warmth, his humility and his sense of humor. Much of it can likely be traced to Msgr. Robert Duffy, the late pastor of Saint Aedan’s Church and an early mentor. Recalling his childhood parish, Bishop Flesey told the Catholic Advocate in 2004, “It was what they did, and how they did it; essentially their care for people.” It has shaped his life, and in turn, countless more lives along the way.

Paul Colford, ’71, P’09 Professional achievement Award In 1973, Saint Peter’s College junior Paul Colford left his native Jersey City to study abroad at the University of Turin. The Italian sojourn would last just a year, but it gave rise to a lifelong journey as a professional journalist. Paul’s freelance pieces appeared in Rome’s English-language Daily American, setting the table for a run of articles picked up by the New York Times during his senior year back on Kennedy Boulevard. He would continue contributing to the Times after graduation, while he earned $125 a week as a staff announcer and newscaster for WADB-FM in Belmar, which, Paul recalls, “mostly played schmaltzy instrumental music.”

Paul began a 20-year run with Newsday in 1980, spent mostlyreporting from New York City for the venerable Long Island daily, and its city-oriented spinoff New York Newsday. Paul’s columns covering the media business appeared in those papers, as well as their corporate cousin the Los Angeles Times. In 2000, the Daily News, hoping to match the archrival New York Post in media coverage, brought Paul aboard to launch “Hot Copy,” a twice-weekly column that examined the media industry just as the internet was beginning to revolutionize the fourth estate. In his last year at the News, his focus shifted to economic development as he covered the contentious rebuilding of the World Trade Center site.

Since 2007, he has served as director of media relations for the Associated Press, which sees him involved in “the work and well-being of a global staff of more than 3,000” working in more than 100 countries at any given time.

As passionate about the Mets and the blues as he is about his work, Paul is the son of Joseph Colford, ’38 and the brother of fellow alumni Joe, Chris, Peter and Brian. He and wife Jane are the parents of Catherine and Liam, ’09.

Leo Cullum, ’59 Professional achievement Award In considering Leo Cullum’s canon of 817 New Yorker cartoons between 1977 and his passing in 2010, there is much reason to be impressed: the humanity of his characters (human or otherwise), the razor-sharp wit, the joy he took in the absurdities of daily life. But ponder this: until 2002, it wasn’t even his day job. No, since 1968 this Marine Corps veteran pilot of more than 200 combat missions in Vietnam had made his living flying Boeing 747s and other passenger jets for TWA.

Drawing cartoons started as an avocation, a way to pass the time on long layovers. “It looked like something I could do,” he said in an interview with Holy Cross Magazine. But for all the sublime subtlety of his panels and of that humble recollection, a man who flew the biggest of the big planes for one of the world’s prestige airlines was bound to aim high. The New Yorker was (and is) the holy of holies for cartoonists, and a tough nut to crack – in 1975 he managed to sell some concepts (but not his finished cartoons) to the editors, who gave legendary illustrator Charles Addams the task of producing them. It was Addams who encouraged him to soldier on, and he finally broke through with a cartoon in Air Line Pilot. It wasn’t quite the New Yorker, but that would follow less than two years later.

Leo retired from American Airlines (following its TWA merger) in 2002, but continued his cartooning from his California home. He passed away in October of 2010 following a five-year battle with cancer, and his last cartoon ran two days later. He was survived by his brother Tom, ’57, wife since 1979 Kathy, a former TWA flight attendant, and their daughters Kimberly and Kaitlin. He also left a vast visual legacy that helped define a genre. At the time of his death, New Yorker editor David Remnick remarked, “Leo made the magazine what it is.”

John Feeney, ’80 Br. Paul Harrison, S.J. Spirit of Prep Award Who better to keep a finger on the pulse of Prep’s alumni community than a Jersey City native who is an alumnus himself, the brother of three fellow alumni and the uncle of two more? Since joining the Prep Alumni Board in 1995, John Feeney, ’80 has been a reliable and respected voice in the decades-old conversation between Prep and its thousands of alumni, near and far. As president of the Alumni Association from 2006-2010, and as a highly visible class chair for the Class of 1980, he has dedicated countless hours to his alma mater and his classmates.

For 20 years, John as been the driving force behind the annual John McGovern, ’80 Memorial 3-on-3 Tournament, celebrating the memory of his late classmate and friend, while helping a new generation of students gain access to the Prep experience through the John McGovern Memorial Scholarship.

On those occasions you don’t find John around Grand & Warren, you can find the same loyalty in action in his professional and family life. He joined Prudential in 1984 and now serves as vice president in External Affairs, part of Law, Compliance, Business Ethics and External Affairs (LCBE). John lives in Morris Plains with Joanne, his wife of 25 years. They are the parents of Ryan (18, a freshman at the University of Scranton), Kate (17, a senior at Morris Catholic High School) and Sean (14, an eighth-grader at Saint Virgil Academy).

Asked about his many years of service to Prep, John states, “During my twenty years on the Prep Alumni Board, I continue to be impressed by the passion and dedication my fellow board members have for Prep.” It’s that very passion and dedication in John himself that we celebrate tonight.

Mike Ring, ’57 Ernie Baker, ’38 community service award Perhaps it comes of being the middle of five children, but Mike Ring is a man of remarkable humility. He refers to his class as “the greatest class that ever came out of Grand & Warren” but volunteers that he personally “graduated (barely), majored in football” and that his junior year featured 140 days of JUG “for accidentally hitting the prefect of discipline in the head with a snowball.”

A graduate of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, Mike enjoyed a varied career that took him from the ocean waves to the electromagnetic kind in the cable TV industry. But it’s after his retirement that the real story begins. In 2001, looking for a way to “give back,” he joined the Ignatian Lay Volunteer program and began working with at-risk youth at the Collier School in Wickatunk, New Jersey. He also took a particular interest in issues of justice in Central America, inspired by the experiences of his daughter-in-law during the years of unrest in El Salvador that claimed the lives of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the Jesuit and Maryknoll martyrs and 70,000 Salvadorans. During a peaceful demonstration at the School of the Americas on the grounds of Fort Benning, Georgia, he “became a ‘prisoner of conscience.’”

In New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and back home after Hurricane Sandy, Mike didn’t hesitate to help wherever he could. “I went to New Orleans because the people needed help and I knew I could contribute,” he recalls. And he led the effort to rebuild a Collier student’s home in Union Beach “because God gave me the parents, the Prep, my family, and the physical and mental attitude that only a fool could fail with all that going for him.” Guided by his faith and that gratitude, Mike says he hopes “many others will experience the joy that results from Prep’s motto, ‘Men for Others.’”

Bishop John Flesey Our Pride and Our Glory Your sisters,

Barbara and Connie

Congratulations

John Feeney, ’80 Deirdre Sullivan, P’12,’17 Dermot Sullivan, ’12 Conor Sullivan, ’17

I thought I’d never laugh again.

Then I saw your jacket.

Leo Cullum cartoon in The New Yorker, October 1, 2001, the first published after the black-on-black cover and cartoon-less issue after September 11, 2001.

In Honor and Memory of Our friend,

Leo Cullum, ’59 The Massaro Family

R

ejoicing with you

Bishop Flesey As you enter the

St. Peter’s Prep Hall of Fame Your Parish Staff Church of the Most Blessed Sacrament Franklin Lakes, NJ

Congratulations

Mike Ring, ’57 and the Hall of Fame Class of 2014

Beth and Jack Savage, ’57

Congratulations to my fellow inductees in the Hall of Fame Class of 2014!

John Feeney, ’80

Congratulations

Bishop John Flesey, ’60 and the Hall of Fame Class of 2014 Dr. Joseph V. Braddock, ’47

Bishop BishopJohn JohnFlesey Flesey

AA MMaann f foorr OOtthheerrss ……. a . al lwwaayyss Rev. Rev.John JohnR.R.Job Job Lauren LaurenLongo Longo

Congratulations to

Paul Colford, ’71, P’09 and all of tonight’s honorees

With Pride & Glory from the Colford Family: Catherine & Joseph E. Colford Jr., ’38, P’68,’71,’73,’74,’81 Mary & Steve Palecek Jeanne & Joe, ’68 Denise & Frank Irene & Chris, ’73 Jeanne Paré & Peter, ’74 Lorie & Matt Reilly Margaret & Brian, ’81

Mik e C ong ra t u l a t ion s to a g r ea t m a n and a r ea l f r i e n d

L ove Ma u r e e n , B r i a n , Pa u l , D a vi d , Er i c a n d mos t of a l l Pa t

For Leo In fond memory.

For Mike Congratulations on a life of service to others.

Bob Groesbeck, ’57

Congratulations

JOHN FEENEY Congratulations JOHN FEENEY From Your Classmates From Your Craig Zegler, ’80 Paul Sciarra, ’80 Classmates Paul Venino, ’80 Jay Coffey, ’80 Class of ’801980 Ken Sisk, Tom Wyville, ’80 Billy McDonough, ’80 Tommy Liccardo, ’80

Class of 1980 and Fr. Azzarto

Acknowledgments & Special Thanks Prep’s Office of Institutional Advancement, along with other members of the Saint Peter’s Prep staff, have played an essential role in ensuring the success of this evening’s event. In particular, we thank the following.

For Their Leadership Support:

Chris Casazza, ’97 Chief Advancement Officer

Kenneth Boller, S.J. President

Michael Wieners, ’04

Director of Alumni Relations

For Their Ongoing Logistical Support: Barkha Cardoz, P’11,’15; Nancy Cunningham, P’99,’01, Jim Horan, ’70, Mike Jiran, ’03, Debbie Peko-Lillis, P’10, Frances Salvo and Liz Walsh Program Design: Mike Jiran, ’03 The Hall of Fame Professional Achievement and Service Awards were created in 2006 by the Saint Peter’s Prep Alumni Board, which sponsors this evening’s induction ceremony and dinner. For their leadership and continued support, we wish to thank the members of the Alumni Board:

Mike Cardino, ’92 Vice President Ray Aumack, ’55 Tony Azzarto, S.J. John Bergin, ’50 Kenneth J. Boller, S.J. Kevin Brodbeck, ‘89 Lou Castelli, ’66 Jack Caulfield, ’71 Lou Cella, ’50

Bob Colacurcio, ’73 President

Len De Pinto, ’76 Sam De Luca, ’86 Gabe Doria, ’81 John Feeney, ’80 Joe Giglio, ’87 Steve Hudik, ’85 Jerry Lally, ’56 Tom Leane, ’04

Sean McNally, ’97 Secretary John Mahoney, ’02 Joe Massarelli, ’80 Tim Mernar, ‘10 Jim Ryan, ’66 Jack Savage, ’57 Paul Schaetzle, ’71 George Taite, ’73

We are grateful to our sponsors, whose generous contributions support the Hall of Fame Scholarship Fund.

Hall of Fame Circle:

Thomas S. Liccardo, ’80 in honor of John Feeney, ’80 Maroon & White Club:

Joseph Braddock, ’47 in honor of Bishop John Flesey, ’60 Jesuit, Honoree and Faculty Sponsors: John E. Savage, ’57

Alec F. Clerihew, ’57

Kevin J. Collins, ’57

in honor of Mike Ring, ’57

in honor of Mike Ring, ’57 and in memory of Leo Cullum, ’59

Paul D. Colford, ’71

John T. Feeney, ’80

J. Paul Schaetzle, ’71

in honor of Paul Colford, ’71, P’09

in memory of Leo Cullum, ’59

John Verdon, ’57

in honor of Mike Ring, ’57

Peter G. Colford, ’74

Laurence T. Fell, ’54

in honor of Paul Colford, ’71, P’09 in honor of Mike Ring, ’57

Gifts to the Hall of Fame Scholarship: Philip A. Cole, ’57 Felix DeJesus, ’01 William DiNicola, ’60 William Haggerty, ’56 Ernest K. Just, ’58 Kevin McCarthy, ’74 in honor of George Krol, ’74 Mary Palecek in honor of Paul Colford, ’71, P’09

Theologian, scholar, pastor, spiritual mentor, counselor, always a “Man for Others”

The Most Rev. John W. Flesey, S.T.D., D.D., Hon.SP’12 Congratulations! Bene Merenti!

Eileen L. Poiani, Ph.D. Saint Peter’s University

We are grateful to these additional sponsors, whose generous contributions support the Hall of Fame Scholarship Fund.

Sons and Daughters of Saint Peter’s: Mr. & Mrs. Philip F. McGovern, ’76, P’11 in honor of John Feeney, ’80 Gifts to the Hall of Fame Scholarship: The Hon. & Mrs. Robert C. Pollock, Jr., ’57 in honor of Mike Ring, ’57

Congratulations Mike

on a lifetime of achievement.

Your integrity, passion, enthusiasm, and humor have enriched all of us! We love you!

The Crotty’s

Thank you for honoring Leo!

The Cullum and Fell Families

From the bottom of our hearts, we congratulate and thank

John Feeney, ’80 for all he has done for Prep and the memory of our brother John McGovern, ’80 With warmest wishes, The McGovern, Cronen and Dalton families

Pride & Glory It is our Pride and our Glory, old in song and in story; and we cherish your name and we love your fair fame for the days of long ago.

And we your sons will be loyal to Saint Peter’s so royal.

May your banners still guide us wherever we go!

It is a story of gladness, with no shadow of sadness; our years spent with you, Saint Peter’s so true, and you hold our hearts’ love yet.

And through the years we will treasure, with a joy beyond measure, the gifts you have given.

We shall never forget.

Vere Homo Pro Aliis “Truly a man for others”

Vere Homo Pro Aliis “Truly a man for others”

CONGRATULATIONS CONGRATULATIONS

John Feeney/’80 John Feeney, ’80 John Feeney/’80 BROTHER HARRISON Br. PaulSPIRIT Harrison, S.J. BROTHER HARRISON SCHOOL AWARD

Spirit of PrepSPIRIT Award recipient SCHOOL AWARD

from the Liccardo Family from theLiccardo Liccardo Family &&& from the Family

ReliableRubber Rubber & Plastic Reliable PlasticMachinery Machinery ’ Tommy Liccardo ‘80 Tommy Liccardo‘77 ’ ‘80 Joseph Liccardo Joseph Liccardo ’ ‘77 Joe Liccardo ‘04 Joe ’‘07 MikeLiccardo Liccardo ‘04 ’‘07 BobbyLiccardo Liccardo ‘10 Mike

Bobby Liccardo ‘10