Why I Volunteer with the Gene Grawe Fund

This is the personal story behind why one of our volunteers helps with the Gene Grawe Fund.

Like many children in the 1950s and 60s, I grew up poor in a medium-sized, single-parent family on Quincy's northwest side. Being from a strict Catholic background going back many generations, all of us kids attended St John the Baptist Elementary School. We all went from Kindergarten through 8th grade there with the hopes of continuing our Catholic education through high school at either Christian Brothers High School for us boys or Notre Dame High School for the girls.

As us older children reached high school, arrangements were made by our mother for us to work off our high school tuition cleaning our respective schools for a couple hours after school each day. Teenage janitorial labor had no glass ceiling or other gender barriers in the 1960s. My older sister cleaned Notre Dame the same as I cleaned Christian Brothers. Us kids called it doing Floors and Boards and it paid $1/hour and would take us the full school year to pay off the $350 tuition.

When we participated in sports requiring after school practice we just got home later than our teammates because Floors and Boards still had to be done. Sometimes we'd have to come in on Saturdays for special projects like painting and such. We probably didn't realize it at the time, but the experience taught us kids the value of work, the value of our education, and the value of investing in ourselves.

The arrangement was working perfectly for all parties until near the end of the 1970-71 school year when it was announced by the newly formed Board of Directors that tuition was being raised to $720 for the 1971-72 school year...my senior year! I wasn't the greatest at math, but even I quickly figured out that I wasn't going to be able to work off the next year's tuition at a $1/hour and still graduate with my class in May 1972.

So I asked the principal, Fr. Philip Scherer, one of the new Servite priests that assumed control of the school the previous fall, about getting a pay raise to $2/hour so I could graduate on time next year. He said that while he understood my predicament, there would be no pay raise of that magnitude for janitorial work. He said that the Board of Directors more than doubling the tuition and my hourly worth as an aspiring janitor were not connected in any way. I begrudgingly conceded his point, because I already knew that the prevailing wage for a teenager in Quincy in 1971 was somewhere around 85¢ or 90¢ an hour.

So with no Gene Grawe Fund, no Everybody Wins Mega Raffle, no Campaign for QND, nor any other financial assistance to help pay some of my senior year's tuition, I ended up transferring to Quincy Senior High School. Everything worked out okay and I'm very proud of my diploma from QSHS. Some years later, it served as a great launching pad for my bachelor's degree. But, I've always believed I was supposed to graduate from Christian Brothers High School with the classmates I had gone to school with dating back to Kindergarten in 1959.

So when the opportunity to assist the Gene Grawe Fund came along, I eagerly jumped in. I know I can't rewrite history, but I believe I can impact the future. I see my volunteering with the Gene Grawe Fund as a way to help ensure today's children of limited means can complete all 13 years of school in the Quincy Catholic education system.