Retired Teacher: 'JFRC Changed My Life'
Jack O'Connell provides access to the Eternal City for future generations
Recently retired English teacher Jack O’Connell sees his year spent at the John Felice Rome Center as transformative. “It’s the one experience that affected me the most. It changed my life.” O’Connell, who now lives in Connecticut, recently honored that experience with a $25,000 bequest.
As a sophomore at John Carroll University in Cleveland in the late ’60s, O’Connell saw a poster in the dean’s office advertising the relatively new JFRC. It immediately piqued his interest. “Some friends and I immediately decided that we wanted to go, but we all had to get the approval of Father Britt, the dean, before he’d let us,” O’Connell describes.
Once at the JFRC in September 1968, O’Connell knew that he was in for a once-in-a-lifetime experience. “The world was less global then. There were no phones,” he remembers. “If you wanted to make a long distance call, you had to place it at the Hilton.” O’Connell loved going to the student union, where everyone was singing along with the Beatle’s newly released “Hey Jude.” One of his favorite trips was to Capri where he and his friends sat on the rocks and jumped into the crystal blue waters. “It was just such a sense of ‘Wow, this is great,’” he recalls.
While at the JFRC, O’Connell also toured the Middle East soon after the Six-Day War. His trip included stops in Israel, Cyprus, Lebanon, and Egypt. “While walking around, jets would fly ominously low overhead,” he recalls. Many years later, he felt the same sense of doom hearing turbines above while living in New York after the September 11th attacks.
The richness of these experiences, O’Connell feels, permanently altered his perceptions. “The experience broadened my mind,” he says. “I felt I had a glimpse of the world.” Through the Kent State shootings and the Vietnam War protests, O’Connell feels that living at the JFRC helped him to stay balanced. “It’s a blessing you are given that grants you a second sight into things.”
The other great benefit of his time at the JFRC was a tight circle of friends. “There’s a group of people I still see. I’m godfather to my classmate’s children,” he explains. “I e-mailed a whole bunch of them recently, telling them it was John Felice’s birthday.”
After returning home from the JFRC on the RMS Queen Elizabeth 2, O’Connell graduated from John Carroll University. He studied Anglo-Irish literature in Dublin for a year, worked at Condé Nast Publications, and then got a master’s degree in English from Columbia University. He taught English at different schools until settling in as a dean and teacher at Brunswick School in Greenwich, Connecticut, from where he retired.
Despite the length of years, O’Connell remains philosophical about the opportunity to study abroad at the JFRC, “It’s an eye opener. You see things through a different lens without feeling superior. Living and working abroad makes you realize that humility is not a weakness. It is a strength.”