A colleague asked me shortly thereafter, "When is Pascucci going to retire?" Since we both knew Vince had already turned 65, I replied, "When he’s good and ready–but, to judge by the energy he still has for teaching, that time is well off in the distance."

He would still be going strong today but for a fulminating stroke in winter 2000, from which he has made a heroic and largely successful recovery.

Vincent Pascucci has had one of the longest and fullest teaching careers in the history of Phillips Academy, as chronicled bellissimo in Theresa Pease’s Winter 1997 Andover Bulletin article on his teaching of Italian. Such was the success of his course that Pascucci received an honorary doctor of humane letters degree from Georgetown Univ-ersity in 1985–largely because several of his former Italian students, then at Georgetown, recommended him for the honor. He achieved such stature in Italian that even PA colleagues sometimes forget how much he accomplished in other languages. He began teaching Latin and Spanish at Port Washington, N.Y., and at Manhasset High School on Long Island, then came to Andover at the invitation of classics department chairman Alston Chase in 1964. Here he taught Latin, classical Greek and Italian; he also taught German for a couple of years and modern Greek as an independent project.

During his tenure as snow-shoveling czar–the one in charge of mustering students and faculty to dig out after a storm–he showed his (considerable) polish in French by quoting Francois Villon: Mais où sont les neiges d’antan? (But where are the snows of yesteryear?) to cheer housemasters and students on in the task.

From 1977-1983, when he was head of the foreign language division, Pascucci worked tirelessly at encouraging the art of teaching throughout the division. After leading his colleagues through the tortuous process of introducing Chinese into the curriculum, he set an example for us all by sitting as a student in Andover’s first Chinese class.

He also attracted the attention of an American Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages project highlighting outstanding foreign-language programs in U.S. high schools. Andover’s was cited by ACTFL as one of 10 exemplary foreign-language programs nationally.

A Latin teacher friend of mine asked me a couple of years ago, "And how is His Pascucci-ness?" Pascucci-ness has to be seen and heard to be appreciated, but it is that irrepressible spirit of Vincent Pascucci that may be the most enduring part of his legacy. A recent Andover video shows his second-year Latin class enacting a scene from a Plautus comedy under the magic wand of the Pascucci persona.

Even as an undergraduate at Columbia (where he later earned a master’s degree in classics and won a Fulbright grant to teach in Italy), Pascucci exuded his enthusiasm for antiquities. While tending bar in Yonkers to help pay his tuition, he studied Juvenal and Ovid between mixing cocktails and explained the Latin to his clientele.

At a language division party given to honor him last spring, he regaled us with a story about his basic training in the army. Crawling on his belly under machine gun fire, what did Pascucci get his platoon to do during that exercise? Sing, yes, that’s right, sing. The song, popular at the time, was "I Didn’t Know the Gun Was Loaded." And in the early ’70s, when no one wanted to do anything remotely traditional, Pascucci convinced Ted Sizer the school should sing "Gaudeamus Igitur" at graduation. It has done so ever since. And guess who, until very recently, taught all those itchy seniors to sing it? You guessed it.

It’s taken two people to replace Vincent Pascucci in the classroom, but no one and nothing can replace his Pascucci-ness.

Nicholas Kip ’60 is chair of the classics department.