Constantine Ricci, longtime Massapequa School District educator, dies at 95

Constantine "Connie" Ricci had an arm for baseball, but his heart was in the classroom. So much so that when the Chicago White Sox offered him a spot on one of their farm teams, he turned it down for a career in education.

“What a heady experience for a boy born in Italy to be asked to play baseball, the all-American sport,” his daughter Linda Ricci said. “The fact that he turned that down for his life's calling — education — means a great deal about his commitment to education.”

Ricci, a longtime Massapequa School District educator and Massapequa Park resident, died on July 17. He was 95.

Ricci was born and raised on his family’s ancestral farm in Filetto, a small village in the Abruzzo region of Italy.

“He would always say, ‘I'm a peasant farmer from Italy,’” his daughter Lisa Ricci Rofsky said. “It defined everything he was.”

He was just 9 years old when his family relocated to Jamaica, Queens, to escape poverty. He didn’t know a drop of English when he arrived, but he ended up graduating from high school with honors at 17. At the same time, he was becoming a local baseball legend as a varsity athlete.

Former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo grew up in Ricci’s neighborhood. Linda Ricci met Cuomo at a book signing in the 1990s and introduced herself as Ricci’s daughter. He told her that Ricci was his boyhood hero.

“You could have knocked my father over… that Mario Cuomo was impressed by him 40 years later,” Ricci said.

Ricci’s baseball tenure took a brief hiatus when he was drafted into World War II right as the war ended. He guarded  the border between North and South Korea  before the Korean War.

After returning to the United States, he attended Hofstra College — now Hofstra University — and played on its baseball team. At one point, Ricci held Hofstra’s record for the longest javelin throw despite not being on the track and field team.

In the summers, he played third base with the semipro Riverhead Falcons.

After declining the White Sox’s offer, Ricci began teaching sixth-grade math and history in the Massapequa School District, as well as coaching varsity baseball and junior varsity basketball. In 1953, he married Marjorie Turner, a Hofstra cheerleader who caught his eye, and started a family in Massapequa Park. The Riccis had a son, Paul, in addition to their two daughters.

He went on to get his master’s degree in education at Hofstra and became the vice principal at John McKenna Junior High School for over two decades. He served as principal of Ames Junior High School for a few years before retiring in 1982.

“He was proud of the generations of students he influenced,” Linda Ricci said.

That pride led him to serve during retirement as director of the Massapequa High Schools Hall of Fame, which honors alumni of Massapequa High School and the former Alfred G. Berner High School (now a middle school). Ricci himself was inducted into the school's Hall of Fame in 1998.

“The thing that stands out in your mind is the warm, kind smile that he seemed to always have,” said Joe Burke, the current director of the hall of fame board. Burke also worked with Ricci at McKenna Junior High School.

His retirement was filled with lots of golf — he played a +2 handicap. He led tours all over the world for the International Golf Federation, but his home base was the Bethpage State Park's Black Course

Ricci was inducted into the Suffolk County Sports Hall of Fame shortly before he died.

Besides his two daughters, who both live in Manhattan, and his son, who lives in San Paulo, Brazil; Ricci is survived by his son-in-law, Neil Rofsky; and grandchildren, Anna and Bennet Rofsky. His wife died in 2020. 

There will be a private gathering to celebrate Ricci's life at a future date. In lieu of flowers, the family asks for donations to Massapequa High School's Hall of Fame.