Memories of Rudolph Mastrocinque

Teacher: 'Intense, very bright young man'

Yesterday I was thinking about 9/11 and automatically about Rudy Mastrocinque. I say automatically because in the couple of days after the tragedy occurred, I read that he was among its victims.

I was a teacher at Northport High School when Rudy was there. In fact, however, he was not in any of my classes. During a duty period, I was assigned to the large commons to help supervise students who hung out there after eating lunch in the adjacent cafeteria. At the time and for some years afterwards, I was the faculty sponsor of the school's Amnesty International group.

As I recall, Rudy who was busy with lots of activities was not a member of the group, but he had heard lots of things about it and was interested in talking to me about it. We must have also discussed track because decades later I remember that he was on the team, and I probably told him about my memories of running the mile when I was in high school. During my 32 years of teaching, hundreds of students passed through my classes and I'm sure that I have forgotten a good many of them, for sure most of the ones who sat in the back of the room and tried to disappear from a class that they might not have liked. Still, there were a small number of students like Rudy whom I cannot forget even though they were not in any of my classes.

I remember him as an intense, very bright young man with the whole world ahead of him. I also remember that those several conversations, and there were probably only that number, were the kind of thing that I found attractive about being a teacher.

I thought yesterday that perhaps I would write about my memory of Rudy. First, however, I wanted to check the spelling of his last name and so it Googled it, finding a number of memorials to him. I was not at all surprised. He was someone to remember.

Howard Blue, Forest Hills