#300LaSalle: Paul Mariani '62

From Mission Month in April until the end of the Jubilee Year in November, members of the Manhattan College community will reflect on the meaning of the Lasallian tradition on campus. 

One of the five Lasallian pillars is quality education. Following in the footsteps of John Baptist de La Salle, Manhattan College’s goal is to make education as accessible to as many people as possible by supporting first generation students, minority students and financially disadvantaged families.

Paul Mariani ’62 was the first in his family to attend college. In a recent essay in America Magazine, Mariani details his experience at Manhattan College and how de La Salle’s vision of education for all gave him the opportunity to attend college and succeed after graduation. 

I am sitting in a small classroom in one of those World War II Quonset huts that line the hill along the rim of Manhattan College in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. It is the spring of 1962—the semester I will graduate—and this is Brother Luke Salm’s religion class. We are blue-booking one of his quizzes, and he is off to one side, reading what looks like endless reams of galleys while the students in the class chew their pencil erasers or scratch their heads before plunging back into the abstruse questions on church doctrine glaring up at them from the page.

For a moment my attention is focused on Brother Luke’s absorption in those galleys of small print, and I am thinking: Yes, this is what I want to do someday. Forget myself and the humdrum world around me and, like some student of the Torah, study the world of words and someday—God willing—my own galleys. Ah, to become lost like him in the cosmic dance of literature, art, music, philosophy and religion, to watch as words form the mica chips of the infinite Word.

Then it is back again to the quiz in front of me whose questions long ago evaporated into the ether of history. In the late afternoon, I will walk through the tree-lined quad, past the chapel and the brick arcade, and head for my friend John Monahan’s ’57 hearse-gray Ford to make the trip back over the Throgs Neck Bridge and Northern Boulevard to Mineola, grab a bite to eat, then head down to the Garden City A&P, where I will stack shelves from 6 to 11, then head home to get my homework done before grabbing five hours of sleep. And then it will be up again and back to Manhattan College.