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The McCourt boys — so outwardly different — took to the stage in the Ballroom. They sang, danced, and told stories that made all of us laugh until we cried and then turned everything on its head again — as we Irish (my mother was Irish) do so well — and made us cry until we laughed.
Frank seemed a bit surprised by the phenomenal success of his first book, “Angela’s Ashes,” which was published in 1996. It had become a New York Time’s Bestseller, received a Pulitzer Prize, sold millions of copies worldwide, and in 1999 became a movie. Not bad for a first book by a retired high school teacher, is it?
I caught up with Frank again during lunch at the Denver Press Club in the midst of the Book Tour for his latest book, “Teacher Man,” a memoir of his thirty years teaching in the New YorkPublic School System.
Almost six years later, Frank still seemed unchanged by time or fame…a humble man with an open heart, and a droll Irish wit.
He began speaking by defining what he referred to as Irish Alzheimer’s:
“You forget,” he said smiling, “everything but the grudges. To truly understand the Irish,” he added, “you must understand our victim mentality.”
“Ask any Irish man, woman, and child, and they’ll be quick to tell you, if there’s anything wrong with us, it’s because of the English. We were about to beat them, but we were betrayed.”
Frank was actually born in Brooklyn, but when he was four years old, his family returned to live in Ireland, in Limerick, his mother’s ancestral home. It wasn’t until he was 19 that he was able to return to the United States.
He says that he decided to become a teacher when he saw Andy Hardy movies in Ireland. “The school life for Andy and his friends,” Frank says, “appeared benign and happy.”
In the United States, nineteen year old Frank got a job working on the docks. Having left school at 13, he wasn’t qualified for much else. But he confessed that he envied college students he saw on the subway. When he was 22, he walked over to the campus of NYU, and ran into the Dean. In order to convince her to let him in, he told her he’d read books.
“I didn’t know that most college students never read a book in their lives,” Frank says smiling.
The Dean let him in, and he passed his teacher’s qualifying exam with a 69. (The passing grade was 65.)
“When I began teaching, I thought teaching was a profession where I would speak, and the students would sit transfixed, and then thank me after class.”
“In my fantasy, one of the students would go home to tell his mom about his great teacher. She would be a widow who had inherited millions, and we would marry.”
Frank was assigned to McKeeVocationalHigh School in Staten Island. The first day, a boy called out, “Anybody want a baloney sandwich?” The boy threw the sandwich, and Frank, seeing that the sandwich was homemade, decided to eat it.
Fairly early on, he realized that “excuse notes” represented American creativity and writing at it’s best.
“You are so lucky,” he told his students one day, “because you are the first class in the history of the world to study the art of the excuse note. Your assignment is to write an excuse note from Adam (or Eve) to God.”
“This was my first big breakthrough,” Frank says slyly. “To ignore the course of study…to ignore the curriculum made up by people who have gone to great lengths to get away from the classroom so they could torture English teachers.”
“The classroom is a place of high drama because the students will go to any lengths to get the teacher away from the lesson. My career in teaching was rich and turbulent. I hope I was useful.”
What does he think of the movie that was made from his bestselling book “Angela’s Ashes?”
“The director and producer were so sincere that they ended up leaving out all the humor and just left in the tragedy.”
“Will ‘Teacher Man’ become a movie?” someone asks him
He begins to laugh.
“That’s what always happens in America,” he says. “You could write the New York City Telephone Directory, and they’d say, ‘What about the moo-oo-vie?’”
As his publicist drags him off for another appearance, his parting words, delivered with a smile, are:
“Remember, we forget everything but the grudges.”
You can order a copy of Teacher Man at www.amazon.com!
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