The OA Athletic Hall of Fame has finally gotten around to selecting students who played during my time at the school. This year a number of “girls” (one, a former student, is now a colleague!) from our state championship soccer teams and the forerunners of our championship basketball teams are being inducted. All excellent choices, but today, I would like to argue that the time has come to develop a new Hall of Fame to honor all graduates of Oliver Ames who have made major accomplishments in life. I’ve mentioned two other students from this era before-Stephanie Hoffman and Erin Dewey. Both were stars on the Mock Trial Team which like the soccer and basketball teams engages in interscholastic competition. Stephanie should just about be completing her time at the Navy’s Top Gun flight school while Erin is the editor of the BC Law Review and is about to begin a clerkship with the federal Circuit Court of Appeals, the second highest court in the country. Both young women have built amazing stories in just a few years, but neither is ever going to get into our Hall of Fame as it is currently constituted.
The purpose of a Hall of Fame is to honor the accomplishments of the inductees, but at a school it can also serve to encourage others to excellence. Selecting any Hall of Fame is daunting process. Look at baseball. Inevitably you induct someone like Addie Joss or Candy Cummings who don’t hit the highest standards and then everyone begins to doubt the whole process. Cummings is in baseball’s Hall of Fame as the possibly legendary inventor of the curveball (in Worcester, believe it or not) although his official designation is as an executive of an early baseball league. Joss died tragically after compiling a 160 and 97 record in his eight years in the majors-he got in for what might have been not what was. And don’t get me started comparing Hall of Famer Catfish Hunter and Luis Tiant-what a joke.
With sports Halls of Fame, you at least have statistics to fall back on. How do you create a broader Hall without succumbing to politics, emotions, or cloudy memories? Obviously, the Hall should only be open to OA graduates with the exception of those folks who didn’t officially graduate due to military service. Second, the primary selection criteria should be contributions to others-“What good does it do a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?” That would be a nice antidote to the “me first” sense of entitlement that is rampant in today’s students. Third, categories should be established with career specific criteria since its hard to compare say a legal career with a career in the arts. Excellence should be a prime criterion in every category. Categories could include: military, the arts, law, public service, education, medicine, and the sciences. I’d start the process with historical research and posthumous awards for the graduates from the period 1869 when our high school opened until about 1930. Anyone who graduated in 1930 would be over 100 years old by the time the new Hall opened. Once we took care of the early graduates, the process would become similar to the athletic Hall of Fame with public recommendations supported by evidence supplementing the obvious choices like soldiers who made the supreme sacrifice for their town and country. A final criterion would be that eligibility wouldn’t open until people were out of school for 25 years since this is to be a “lifetime” (eligibility would begin around age 43) achievement award.
Stay tuned. Tomorrow we begin a new series on food. Can you create a healthy and affordable diet that is socially and environmentally responsible?
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