Running With a Purpose

Profile of an HEAA President

Santo Joseph Aurelio, ALB '83, ALM '85, EdD '89

In 1996, Joe Aurelio, ALB '83, ALM '85, EdD '89, ran his last marathon. It was a great year--the 100th running of the Boston Marathon and Aurelio's 23rd. He took his time, completing the course in 6:28 hours. As he ran (and sometimes walked) the 26 miles from Hopkinton to the Prudential, he recalled his first outing in 1965. He weighed only 165 back then, but even that was 60 pounds more than the man from Japan who took the wreath. Crossing the finish line now, at age 64, Joe felt good. His time was only 1 hour and 41 minutes more than his best time, set long ago--years before earning bachelor's and master's degrees at the Harvard Extension School and a doctorate at BU, and before seeing his four children follow in his footsteps, attending college and graduate school, and making something valuable of their lives.

Santo Joseph Aurelio was born in 1932 in Boston's West End, the neighborhood around Massachusetts General Hospital. He was the tenth and last child of Italian immigrants and the only one born in the great hospital nearby. "It was a fabulous polyglot community," Aurelio recalls, "with French, a few Spanish, and many, many Italians, Jews, and Irish." It was an idyllic time--the kids swam in a cleaner Charles River--but not without its dangers. Aurelio was blown out of his sister's arms in the Hurricane of '38 ("Some guy grabbed me out of the air, but many died in the storm"). Aurelio fondly remembers the Jewish variety-store owner who taught him to count to 100 in Yiddish and introduced him to the joys and duties of hard work. "The old man had difficulty getting up in the morning, so I would go back in the alley and bang on the window. He would yell, 'Alright, alright, alright!' and some other things in Yiddish and then come out through the store and let me in. Then we would bring in the milk, the bread, and the Italian newspapers that were waiting out front. I liked helping him, and it turns out that I resembled his only son, who had died years earlier from stepping on a rusty nail."

The Aurelio family was poor, like most of their neighbors, but young Santo recognized from the beginning that school and work would be the parallel tracks to a better life. His Catholic grade school teachers instilled in him a lifelong love of the English language, particularly its grammatical structures and the wealth of its vocabulary. "Their teaching was nonpareil," he said, relishing the chance to use a word that entered the language centuries ago from the middle French, and, before that, the vulgar Latin and classical Latin itself. Paradoxically, his love was unrequited at Boston English High School, the oldest public high school in America. Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot were there, but not the meticulous analysis of words, their colors and nuances, their cases and tenses, and the ways they found their place in a writer's style. Aurelio's delight in these things would have to wait 30 years, to be rekindled in the expository writing classes he took at the Harvard Extension School.

Aurelio longed to attend college, yet, unexpectedly, the burden of supporting his aging parents fell to the youngest child. As a boy he had sold newspapers and shined shoes at the Boston Garden, a block from his house, as boxing, wrestling, and pop music raged inside. ("I sold the Post, the Record American, and the Traveler, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Globe--the names kept changing--but I got to meet some famous people, like Frank Sinatra and Gene Autrey.") He was fired after a few weeks as a soda jerk at Kresge's Department Store for putting whole strawberries on the ice cream sundaes. After high school he worked at Wyman-Kramer Custom Clothiers, shrinking cloth and sweeping the floors. He worked at the Day-Old Grocery and the Associated Folding Box Company. At Associated Box he was allowed ten minutes for supper and less than a minute for bathroom breaks--"because the boxes just kept coming down the conveyer belt whether you were there or not!" The factory was hot and the pay was 75 cents an hour.

Between jobs Aurelio would go to the top floor of a high-rise office building and begin knocking on doors. "Hi. Need any help? Hi, Need any help?" The answer was usually "Nothin' today, kid." So he would work his way down the building, floor-by-floor, then on to the next building. He worked for S. H. Knopf Leather Company, doing the work of three people, and then Sta-Ple Belts, which was so full of cockroaches there was no place to put your lunch box. One day a letter came from the Massachusetts Bonding Insurance Company, offering Aurelio a position as dittograph operator. This involved placing the stencils on the ink drum and pressing a bar to crank out copies--different colors for different departments. Hoping eventually to be promoted to underwriter "and to wear a white collar," Aurelio accepted the job and the moniker "Joe Ditto" that his friends mercilessly called him for years to come.

In September, 1951, Aurelio received a flier on court reporting from the Stenotype Institute of Boston. In the admissions interview he was handed a sheet with shorthand text, where "you" was written "U," "are" was "R," and "the" was "T." He read it without hesitation and was admitted immediately. Aurelio's training at the Stenotype Institute, on the sixth floor of 80 Boylston Street in Back Bay, launched a career that took him into the municipal courts of Boston, to the United States Army judicial corps in Korea, and back to Boston, where he served the Massachusetts Superior Court for 30 years. During the years 1953-1990, Aurelio became legendary for speed and accuracy in transcribing and repeating, on request, the proceedings of the court, regardless of the complexity and technicality of the trial (he was particularly knowledgeable in forensic medicine). He was frequently elected to high offices in the court reporters associations at the municipal, state, and national levels, and became a coveted speaker on court reporting and English usage in professional and private life.

On the first day of class at the Stenotype Institute in 1951, Aurelio met his future wife, Josephine, at 18 a year younger than he and also a beginning stenography student. It was love at first sight, says the husband of 49 years. "She was a fine person in every respect: as wife, mother, friend, sister, and aunt, and I suppose it was pure luck to find someone whose love never grows stale. It's a miracle!" From that time on they have been a team, raising four children and keeping the family intact during the long years of Aurelio's odyssey in higher education.

In 1979, with the kids graduated from college, it was finally Aurelio's turn. After a brief enrollment at Boston University, Aurelio summoned the courage to enroll at the Harvard Extension School. "A wonderful man named John Adams" helped him transfer and consolidate his credits, aim straight for the Bachelor of Liberal Arts degree, and the realization of his life's dream.

He studied everything--geology, history, Italian film, ancient Jewish art--and, of course, English and writing. His undergraduate thesis, "Jewish Art in the Greco-Roman Period," listed 67 books in the bibliography ("I read every one of them and loved every minute of it"), and Santo Joseph Aurelio graduated with honors in 1983--at the age of 51.

Like many ALB graduates, Aurelio immediately enrolled in the Master of Liberal Arts Program, completing his coursework and thesis in a mere two years--working full time all the while as a court reporter. Still voracious for learning, he entered the doctoral program at the Boston University School of Education, completing that degree in 1989 with a dissertation titled "Mnemonic Devices in the Teaching of English Grammar."

Earning three postsecondary degrees in the span of ten years was not easy, Aurelio admits. "In the final years of the doctorate, I had to skip breakfast and grow a beard because I was just too busy to eat and shave." But after each graduation, he considered leaving court reporting to begin a new career in college teaching. He sent out resumes and contacted institutions far and wide. And there were takers: Aurelio has lectured at Massachusetts Bay Community College, Quincy College, Newbury College, and Northern Essex Community College since the early 1980s. His subjects have ranged from English grammar and composition to court reporting, art history, medical terminology, and English as a second language.

Since his retirement from court reporting in 1990, Aurelio has maintained his tireless pace. A community leader in the town of Belmont, he has married 85 couples as a justice of the peace, served on boards for the local Catholic parish, judged oratory contests for the VFW, written more than 100 poems and lyrics, taught English to immigrants and literacy to American nationals, studied operatic voice, and performed with his wife at Hynes Auditorium ("without a mike"). He has served as a docent in the Harvard Art Museums, a tour guide for the City of Boston, and played Santa Claus each year for numerous civic and religious organizations.

Looking back, Aurelio concludes, "My greatest satisfaction in life is my Harvard education. My only disappointment is that my parents didn't live to attend my Harvard Commencement." In token of his gratitude for the opportunity to realize his dream of a college degree, Aurelio met with Dean Michael Shinagel in 1993 to establish the Santo Joseph Aurelio Prize "for a graduate older than 50 who has exemplified excellence in his or her academic career and his or her personal life." This prize is conferred each year at the Harvard Commencement upon an outstanding Extension School graduate who has followed in Aurelio's footsteps. Meanwhile, the Harvard Extension Alumni Association (HEAA) reciprocated Aurelio's love of the Harvard Extension School by electing him president of the Association in 2001.

HEAA members who know Aurelio are convinced that some old Boston Marathon runners never die--they just run harder and harder every year.

Dean Christopher S. Queen