LONG BEACH, IND — By age 16, John G. Roberts Jr., a young Catholic and son of a steel company executive, was emerging as a gifted writer with firmly rooted traditional values. An editorial, the Supreme Court nominee penned for his high school paper in 1972, refers to the Latin texts of Cicero and offers a fervent argument against admitting girls to La Lumiere School - then an all-boys school in northern Indiana. “I tend to think that the presence of the opposite sex in the classroom will be confining rather than catholicizing,” he wrote.
From all accounts, Judge Roberts made his own breaks, beginning at an early age. Several retired teachers and former classmates of Judge Roberts recall an insightful student who excelled in the classroom and on the playing fields, constantly raising the bar for his peers. “He was the finest student in terms of academic ability and raw talent," said David Kirkby, who taught Judge Roberts in math and morals classes and coached him on the football and wrestling teams. “He was just the most powerful student intellectually that the school ever had.”
James L. Coppens, who taught Latin, said Judge Roberts plowed through four years’ worth of the subject in a three-year stretch, requiring the teacher to create a special one-on-one Latin curriculum for the eager student.
“In his senior year, we were reading Virgil’s Aeneid and by the end of the year, he was just about able to translate it as well as I could if not better,” Mr. Coppens said. He was “head and shoulders above” everyone, the “best I ever bad?’ The extra study likely helped Judge Roberts become La Lumiere’s first student accepted to Harvard.
John Glover Roberts Jr. was born in 1955 in Buffalo, N.Y., to Rosemary and John “Jack” Roberts Sr., who was hired that year by the powerful Bethlehem Steel Corp. The family moved to Indiana in 1960, where Jack Roberts, winning high regard for his Japanese-style management techniques, was tabbed as an assistant general manager to run the electrical engineering section of a new plant in Burns Harbor. John Langley, who worked under Jack Roberts at the plant and had a son about the same age as John G. Roberts Jr. said, “He was a really nice man, but a technocrat. There was nothing political about Jack Roberts.”
The family, including Judge Roberts’ three sisters, built a house nearby in the small, resort-like town of Long Beach, just blocks from the southern shore of Lake Michigan. They settled into the area’s large Catholic community, becoming regulars at the Notre Dame Church. The children went to the church’s elementary school, and later, young John enrolled in La Lumiere in nearby La Porte, Ind.
Judge Roberts worked temporarily at Burns Harbor through a program that gave jobs to children of plant managers. John Langley Jr., a schoolmate of Judge Roberts, also worked summers at the plant. “It was labor” Mr. Langley said of his job, which offered “monster money back in the early ‘70s,” paying about $8.75 an hour for cleaning up industrial waste and other “really nasty jobs” that year-round laborers didn’t want to do.
The summer work might have influenced Judge Roberts, but it was at La Lumiere, the small private school founded in 1963 by Indiana friends and business associates, where his intellect was shaped. La Lumiere was not tied officially to the Catholic Church, meaning its teachers were not nuns and priests. However, priests visited to celebrate Mass on Sundays. Nestled on a bucolic pond-side campus, the 90 or so boys accepted to the school interacted with the young teaching staff like a tight knit family, former teachers said. The curriculum was rigorous, and students were expected to participate in sports. In his senior year, Judge Roberts was co-captain of the football team and he won 12 out of 13 matches in the 132-pound weight class as a wrest1er. Judge Roberts had deep friendships with other students, several of whom remember him as their sharpest peer. Although four boys in his class won mention for a single subject, records show that Judge Roberts won graduation prizes for chemistry, English, English essay, French, history, history essay, mathematics and theology!
La Lumiere, which is French for “the light,” also marked a key period when he was intimately exposed to children from other backgrounds. “He was certainly among the brightest of the bright, and I remember him as just a genuinely nice guy. He never wanted to flaunt it,” said Neil A. Barclay, who was one of the first black students admitted to the school. He graduated a year ahead of Judge Roberts in 1972 and is now president and chief executive officer of the African American Cultural Center of Greater Pittsburgh. #
Cross posted at Israel Commentary
Neglected information and opinion relative to Israel, the Middle East and the immediate world.
Israel Commentary
A Snapshot of Judge John G. Roberts, Jr.
By Guy Taylor
Redacted from THE WASHINGTON TIMES, September 07, 2005
From all accounts, Judge Roberts made his own breaks, beginning at an early age. Several retired teachers and former classmates of Judge Roberts recall an insightful student who excelled in the classroom and on the playing fields, constantly raising the bar for his peers. “He was the finest student in terms of academic ability and raw talent," said David Kirkby, who taught Judge Roberts in math and morals classes and coached him on the football and wrestling teams. “He was just the most powerful student intellectually that the school ever had.”
LONG BEACH, IND — By age 16, John G. Roberts Jr., a young Catholic and son of a steel company executive, was emerging as a gifted writer with firmly rooted traditional values. An editorial, the Supreme Court nominee penned for his high school paper in 1972, refers to the Latin texts of Cicero and offers a fervent argument against admitting girls to La Lumiere School - then an all-boys school in northern Indiana. “I tend to think that the presence of the opposite sex in the classroom will be confining rather than catholicizing,” he wrote.
From all accounts, Judge Roberts made his own breaks, beginning at an early age. Several retired teachers and former classmates of Judge Roberts recall an insightful student who excelled in the classroom and on the playing fields, constantly raising the bar for his peers. “He was the finest student in terms of academic ability and raw talent," said David Kirkby, who taught Judge Roberts in math and morals classes and coached him on the football and wrestling teams. “He was just the most powerful student intellectually that the school ever had.”
James L. Coppens, who taught Latin, said Judge Roberts plowed through four years’ worth of the subject in a three-year stretch, requiring the teacher to create a special one-on-one Latin curriculum for the eager student.
“In his senior year, we were reading Virgil’s Aeneid and by the end of the year, he was just about able to translate it as well as I could if not better,” Mr. Coppens said. He was “head and shoulders above” everyone, the “best I ever bad?’ The extra study likely helped Judge Roberts become La Lumiere’s first student accepted to Harvard.
John Glover Roberts Jr. was born in 1955 in Buffalo, N.Y., to Rosemary and John “Jack” Roberts Sr., who was hired that year by the powerful Bethlehem Steel Corp. The family moved to Indiana in 1960, where Jack Roberts, winning high regard for his Japanese-style management techniques, was tabbed as an assistant general manager to run the electrical engineering section of a new plant in Burns Harbor. John Langley, who worked under Jack Roberts at the plant and had a son about the same age as John G. Roberts Jr. said, “He was a really nice man, but a technocrat. There was nothing political about Jack Roberts.”
The family, including Judge Roberts’ three sisters, built a house nearby in the small, resort-like town of Long Beach, just blocks from the southern shore of Lake Michigan. They settled into the area’s large Catholic community, becoming regulars at the Notre Dame Church. The children went to the church’s elementary school, and later, young John enrolled in La Lumiere in nearby La Porte, Ind.
Judge Roberts worked temporarily at Burns Harbor through a program that gave jobs to children of plant managers. John Langley Jr., a schoolmate of Judge Roberts, also worked summers at the plant. “It was labor” Mr. Langley said of his job, which offered “monster money back in the early ‘70s,” paying about $8.75 an hour for cleaning up industrial waste and other “really nasty jobs” that year-round laborers didn’t want to do.
The summer work might have influenced Judge Roberts, but it was at La Lumiere, the small private school founded in 1963 by Indiana friends and business associates, where his intellect was shaped. La Lumiere was not tied officially to the Catholic Church, meaning its teachers were not nuns and priests. However, priests visited to celebrate Mass on Sundays. Nestled on a bucolic pond-side campus, the 90 or so boys accepted to the school interacted with the young teaching staff like a tight knit family, former teachers said. The curriculum was rigorous, and students were expected to participate in sports. In his senior year, Judge Roberts was co-captain of the football team and he won 12 out of 13 matches in the 132-pound weight class as a wrest1er. Judge Roberts had deep friendships with other students, several of whom remember him as their sharpest peer. Although four boys in his class won mention for a single subject, records show that Judge Roberts won graduation prizes for chemistry, English, English essay, French, history, history essay, mathematics and theology!
La Lumiere, which is French for “the light,” also marked a key period when he was intimately exposed to children from other backgrounds. “He was certainly among the brightest of the bright, and I remember him as just a genuinely nice guy. He never wanted to flaunt it,” said Neil A. Barclay, who was one of the first black students admitted to the school. He graduated a year ahead of Judge Roberts in 1972 and is now president and chief executive officer of the African American Cultural Center of Greater Pittsburgh. #
Cross posted at Israel Commentary
Neglected information and opinion relative to Israel, the Middle East and the immediate world.
Israel Commentary
Posted by Jerome Kaufman at September 7, 2005 12:42 PM