Melissa Bailey File Photo
Hunter.
John Dow returned to New Haven to offer a vision of a lion at heaven’s threshold.
Ben Hunter’s basketball coach asks him to put his cigar out at the Pearly Gates, Dow told a standing-room-only crowd of mourners. “He walks around and says: ‘Yo, Moses, whyn’t you let me borrow that staff?’ ‘Yo, David, show me the sling shot; I don’t believe it.’ Sitting down with Dr. King, Mother Theresa at his first heavenly meal, Ben’s at the table and looks down at all of us and says, ‘Now what?’”
In terms comic, endearing, and larger than life, Dow, New Haven’s former superintendent of schools, and a host of other luminaries celebrated the life of Ben Hunter at a memorial service Wednesday at Immanuel Missionary Baptist Church.
Hunter, a coach and youth worker in Dixwell, was found dead on Dec. 15 at 63.
His death prompted an outpouring of tributes, including Wednesday’s service, where he was remembered as a New Haven original whose zest for life and spirit of caring rescued the lives of hundreds of kids during three decades of teaching, coaching, and mentoring.
As an exemplary athlete at Hillhouse High and later as the school’s assistant principal, he was known for setting kids straight or getting them scholarships to his alma mater West Virginia State University. He made generations of friends.
Beneath Immanuel Baptist’s high arching vaults, mourners were solemnly escorted to seats by white-gloved ushers as pastor Samuel T. Ross-Lee intoned, “In my father’s house there are many mansions. If it were not so, I wouldn’t have told you.”
Speaker after speaker recalled tales of “Hunt”: How the toughest gang members dispersed when the physically imposing man approached. How he locked John Dow in the Hillhouse bathroom as a spirit-building stunt for his basketball team. How the atmosphere at Immanuel became as much athletic fieldhouse as worship house.
Hunter gave Michelle Threats her first job keeping the scores at the Connecticut Basketball Association “Shoot-Out” program that he founded. Now she’s that program’s vice president. “He was the ultimate teacher,” she said in her eulogy, “who mentored hundreds, who went on to mentor thousands.”
Hillhouse’s recently retired principal, Lonnie Garris, told the crowd how everyone at school knew when it was Hunger’s birthday. He wore a tuxedo to school and also arranged for an early exit to celebrate.
“Such a robust laugh, and zest for living,” Garris said. “He’ll be part of our [community] conversation for a very long time.”
Tim Shriver, CEO of the Special Olympics and a former Hillhouse High-based youth worker, brought the house down with his recollections of Hunter’s “cane dance, ” that is, pivoting on his cane and carrying on among young women listening to music.
“Part Langston Hughes, a little Malcolm, a little Martin, a little Rosa Parks – there were times he wouldn’t move. A little Richard Pryor,” Shriver said of Hunter.” He knew his mayors, but he was always loyal to the people on the outside.”
Shriver recalled how Hunter rescued him when he had had the hubris to think that he could handle all aspects of a dance at Hillhouse. The last tune died down. No one would go home. What was to be done? Hunter cruised by in his signature Town Car. The kids went home.
Making a reference to the low point in Hunter’s life, when he was convicted of stealing money from a federally funded youth basketball grant program he administered, Shriver said, addressed “those who judge him from a distance.”
“Do not judge,” Shriver said. “The rule of caring was the number one rule Ben never broke.”
In the back row of the church Wilbert Paterson, not among the speakers, recalled how when he came to New Haven in 1970 Hunter made his acquaintance in the aisle at Macy’s. They talked basketball. Hunter then gave him his first job, as a basketball referee.
“You can’t count the number of kids Ben saved from the streets or helped graduate from school,” Paterson said. “He was the greatest thing that ever happened in New Haven.”
“He was an original. None of us ever pictured Ben not showing up for us. Now we don’t have to worry. He’s with all of us,” said Shriver.
Hunter had been cremated; his ashes were in the church during the service. When it concluded, many of the hundreds of mourners shifted to the Elk’s Club on Webster to continue the celebration of Ben Hunter’s life.