Peter Gasparino, a beloved teacher and coach at the old St. Mary High School and a passionate Democrat active in town affairs, died Nov. 7 at the Nathaniel Witherell nursing home after a long illness. He was 81 years old.
Gasparino served for 24 years on Greenwich Board of Estimate and Taxation, where he was “known as the conscience of the BET,” said Edward T. Krumeich, a fellow Greenwich Democrat who is now a Superior Court judge in New Haven. Gasparino was also known for carrying on spirited debates, notably with then-BET chairman Sam Stowell. When Stowell once expressed a desire to get inside Gasparino’s head—presumably to learn how his lively mind worked—he was warned, “You don’t want to do that! Once you get in, you’ll never get out.”
Gasparino’s zeal could be infectious. “He was my mentor and my role model,” said Krumeich, who had Gasparino as a football coach and a homeroom teacher at St. Mary. He followed Gasparino into local Democratic politics; to the BET (Krumeich served for 14 years); and in running for a seat in the state legislature—an almost unwinnable prize for a Greenwich Democrat. “He was a staunch liberal, a defender of human rights, and deeply religious,” said Krumeich. The judge also noted Gasparino’s popularity at St. Mary: “There’s been a tremendous outpouring of admiration and affection among the school community.”
State Rep. Fred Camillo had “Mr. Gas” for speech class at St. Mary, and also counts him as a mentor. Later, when they would go out for their monthly breakfasts at Glory Days Diner, Gasparino would get so animated about the subject under discussion—no doubt partly because Camillo turned out to be a Republican—that his voice would rise and heads would turn. “Ah, don’t worry about them,” he’d say with a grin and a wave of his hand.
“He was one of the toughest men I ever met and also one of the most compassionate,” Camillo said. “It’s a rare combination.”
Gasparino was born in Greenwich on July 25, 1934, the son of the late Joseph Gasparino and Lucy Yantorno Gasparino. Growing up during the Great Depression, Camillo said, Gasparino would have the holes in his shoes plugged with newspaper, as many poor kids did. He graduated from Greenwich High School and then served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War. He received his bachelor’s degree from Fairmont State University in Fairmont, W.Va., and his master’s in education from the University of Bridgeport. He spent 20 fruitful years—1963 to 1983—at St. Mary High School as a teacher, assistant football coach, and drama director. After leaving, he was vice president of Temco Building Maintenance for 27 years.
Gasparino served on the Community Development Block Grant Committee in Greenwich for 15 years; the town’s recreation board for five years; was a member of the Byram-Cos Cob Rotary Club for more than 25 years; and a member of the Knights of Columbus for more than 55 years. He also coached Babe Ruth League baseball and Midget League football. Last year the Greenwich Old Timers Athletic Association honored Gasparino with its Coach’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Bill McAndrews, who teaches at Trinity Catholic in Stamford, had Gasparino as a teacher at St. Mary in the sixties, and taught alongside him there in the seventies and eighties. “His teaching style? Fiery, feisty, energetic, dynamic,” McAndrews said, referring especially to his public speech class. “He liked to stir things up to get the students to get up and speak. He’d even say outlandish things about the town or the country to gets students to respond.” That meant engaging with each student on a personal level. “If he found out you were a sports fan, he’s knock your team. And then you’d want to get up and defend it.”
Gasparino had a distinctive presence with his stout, energetic physique, expressive face, and shock of black, then gray, then white hair that never grew thinner. He was proud of his working class roots. Fred Camillo recalled the days when Gasparino, the father of four girls, supplemented his modest Catholic school salary with a part-time job at Belmont Feed—“and he did it proudly.”
When they debated politics or philosophy, Camillo said, his occasional frustration never shaded into personal judgment. “He never ascribed motives, he’d just stick to issues. A great many Republicans voted for him for the BET, because even if they sometimes disagreed, they knew he came from a good place.”
“Well, we buried Pete today,” William Giacomo, a justice on New York’s Supreme Court in White Plains who was also a student of Gasparino’s, both in the classroom and on the football field, said when reached Wednesday afternoon. Asked what made Gasparino tick, he said, “He was very much a liberal man, and he wasn’t afraid to let you know he was a liberal. In today’s society, people are much less willing to say so. But Pete didn’t worry that you might not like him. He would give me his mind just as if he was still my teacher in school.”
Though also a Democrat—a less liberal one—Giacomo enjoyed threatening to clap Gasparino in jail if he strayed across the state line, just as Gasparino enjoyed challenging Giacomo from the left on the issues. “But he did it so that you liked him. That was his uniqueness.”
If Gasparino could be combative in public meetings, it was a measure of his deep caring. “He wasn’t afraid to stand up to the powers that be,” Krumeich said. “He was a voice for those who had no voice—a voice for the unprivileged where too often the voice you hear is the voice of privilege.”
Howard Richman, a Greenwich Democrat who recently ran for tax collector, said, “What I think of him is what I thought today at his funeral—that he was a big, warm guy with a giant heart that touched the lives of so many people.”
Gasparino spent his last several years in Stamford. He leaves his longtime companion, Nan Markel; three daughters, Bernadette, Cathy and Ellen; a sister, Barbara; ten grandchildren; and a great-grandson. His daughter Laura predeceased him.
A Mass of Christian Burial was held Wednesday, Nov. 11, at St. Roch Church in the Chickahominy section of town. The family asks that any memorial contributions be made to the Boys & Girls Club of Greenwich, 4 Horseneck Lane, Greenwich, CT 06830.
