ST SEBASTIAN’S

Pictured: The 1943-44 basketball team (standing) Harold McKinney ’46, Dan Sullivan ’46, William O’Leary ’47, Hank Barry ’45, Robert Baker ’45,
Coach Vin Murphy, (sitting) Edmund Murphy ’45, Msgr. Charles McInnis, Rick Tonner, Fr. Russell Collins, and Edmund Courtney ’45.
“One daily athletic activity was avoiding bricks, rocks, and wood
with nails in it,” said Barry. “There were rocks all over the place. You
could’ve sprained an ankle.
“It was kind of a little bit dangerous. The land had only been
purchased in the summer of ’41
from the old Newton Country
Day School and on September
21, 1941, we started school.”
The athletic facilities were
also less than desirable.
“We had a gym with a dirt
floor where we played our
basketball games,” Barry recalled.
The schooling all took place in one room where the boys could
smell the food from the refectory.
“Mainly we would wait for lunch all morning,” Barry stated of
his early classes. “We could smell all the wonderful food…”
Barry was initially intimidated by the amount of schoolwork the
faculty expected him to complete.
St. Sebastian’s was one of the best
things that ever happened to me...
I’ll always love this School.
“I remember thinking: ‘What do they mean by three hours of
studying per night? Is that for real?’”
He also recalls several doses of discipline right off the bat once he
arrived at the School.
“My Latin teacher called me
an ‘irascible introvert.’ I was a
wise guy—so I thanked him for
the two new vocabulary words
that began with the letter ‘I’.”
But Barry says that one of
the best things that happened to
him at the School was gaining
humility.
“I remember thinking I was hot stuff during my first year. Well,
Fr. Meehan had me in his office and said to me, ‘Who the heck do
you think you are?’” he noted.
Barry’s father, an Alcoa employee who was entrusted to ship
aluminum throughout the New England area, passed away during
Barry’s second year at St. Sebastian’s when he was just sixteen.
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