After high school, Louis Vaccaro figured he’d make a living as either a plumber or a newspaper deliveryman.
Instead, the GI bill helped him earn three advanced degrees. Vaccaro went on to head six colleges across the country, including Saint Rose in Albany.
It’s the kind of life that lends itself to a lot of good stories.
Write a book, friends told him. Write a book, his daughters said. Write a book, a former student implored him, and she went one further. If Vaccaro would pass on his stories to her — record them, write them down, whatever — she’d turn them into a book.
OK, he decided after he retired. Let’s do this. He sat down and started sketching out the path he had taken, the funny things that had happened along the way.
He was born in 1930, at the height of the Great Depression. He lived in a crowded house with his parents, six siblings and his grandmother and grandfather. With so many mouths to feed, everyone had to earn their keep. Vaccaro was 7 when he started delivering newspapers.
He and his brother shined shoes, too. They worked at an air base near their house. One day, the guy who shined shoes at the base’s PX offered the brothers a chance for some extra monehy. They could shine the shoes at the PX for 15 cents and keep 10 cents, giving him 5. They did that for two or three months, until one day the guy didn’t show up.
Turned out he was in jail, Vaccaro said. So he and his brother claimed the PX shoeshine, with its fancy double-seated chair, as their own.
After a stint in the Air Force during the Korean War, Vaccaro went to school on the GI bill, earning an economics degree from the University of Southern California.
Later, he earned two master’s degrees. He really wanted his Ph.D., but with a growing family — he has five daughters — he just didn’t have the time and money to put toward it. A professor talked to him about a fellowship that would cover his tuition and give him $3,000 a month. The catch? Vaccaro would have to give up his job, which was bringing in $5,000 a month.
He took the fellowship, and while he was busy with classes, his wife was busy making clothes and baking bread. “We lived on $25 a week,” he said.
When he was offered a job as the academic vice president at the University of Portland, the salary was $20,000. Vaccaro insisted on just $18,000. He read that was what the school’s highest-paid professor made; he didn’t see why he should make more than that.
Vaccaro kind of fell into the job at Portland. What he really wanted to do was join the Peace Corps. On his way to Washington, D.C., to learn more about the program, he stopped in Portland. He met up with an old friend, who was aghast that Vaccaro was thinking of taking his young daughters to Africa.
“He was very upset,” Vaccaro said. “He said, ‘We need you here.’”
The friend worked at the University of Portland. He told Vaccaro that there was an opening for an academic vice president and he was going to submit Vaccaro’s name for consideration.
Later, Vaccaro befriended a number of international students, including one from Africa who asked him for help bringing other African students to study in the U.S. Vaccaro envisioned “enclaves of internationalism on campus” that would benefit both foreign and American students.
It waalways an easy sell. Many of the students he proposed bringing to the U.S. didn’t speak English well. But Vaccaro argued with college administrators that he wasn’t asn’t sking for the students to be given degrees they didn’t earn.
“I just wanted to give them an opportunity to prove themselves,” he said.
Students from 35 countries at Saint Rose when he was there. Today, they are bankers, doctors and professors, he said. He points proudly to Jacob and Maurice Chi, brothers he helped bring to to the U.S. when he was president of Siene Heights College. They had no money and knew 12 English words when they arrived in the U.S. Jacob is a symphony conductor in Colorado and Maurice is a business executive in Boston.
“They both drive BMWs,” Vaccaro said. More importantly, “They’re both American citizens who pay taxes.”
His international connections have thrived in his retirement. Vaccaro still regularly travels to Asia. He has a home in Las Vegas, but he’s temporarily living in the Capital District again as he helps care for his wife’s terminally ill mother. He works out everyday at Gold’s Gym and boasts he’s the same weight he was as a high school football player. He likes to read and meditate everyday.
His book was self-published and is available at the Book House in Stuyvesant Plaza and the Saint Rose bookstore. He hopes some former students will read and enjoy it. He’d really like to have it translated into Chinese. He thinks it could be inspirational.
Life is funny, he said. Sometimes you wind up taking a different path than you planned. Just look at the title of his book: “Around the Corner: From Shoeshine Boy to College President.”
