Allan Appel Photo
2022 Hall of Famer Shirley Neighbors (right) pins 2024 inductee Charles Williams for a half century of service to New Haven's public schools.
“First there was a worm. Then we did a lamb’s heart, and then a cat. I’ll never forget how I found a bird in the cat’s belly.”
“That’s right. We dissected everything.”
“And, by the way, I want to tell you I just got my PhD.”
That was the catch-up of great news and affectionate student-teacher memory shared by long-time Lee and Career High School biology, anatomy, and chemistry teacher Shirley Neighbors and her student Arelious Heggie; they hadn’t seen each other in more than 20 years.
Saturday morning on the sunlit porch of Anthony’s Ocean View eatery in Morris Cove, it was one of many similar emotional conversations unfolding as more than 300 people gathered for the Lee-Career Alumni Association’s third Hall of Fame induction ceremonies.
On hand were students, the most venerable now in their 70s, along with teachers, administrators, coaches, and other staff from Lee High School, which stood on the site of today’s Yale School of Nursing in the Hill from 1968 to 1986; and then was supplanted by today’s Career High, into which most of the staff and students moved.
Through a process of public nominations, review by a research committee, and then public voting on a slate of finalists, 15 inductees were celebrated.
Hall of Fame founder Pamela Monk Kelley and 2024 inductee Paul Hollywood Henderson.
The inductees range this year from professional educators like the current Hamden Superintendent of Schools Gary Highsmith (Lee ‘83) to Pulitzer Prize-winning financial writer David Wessel (Lee ’72) to attorney and national legal educator Jeanette Manning (Career ’92) to Geary Claxton (Career ’04), the school’s all-time basketball leader in points, rebounds, and blocked shots.
If you notice something unusual here, it’s that the Lee-Career Hall of Fame is unique in New Haven and likely far beyond, in that it celebrates not only athletics but also humanitarian, lifetime, and professional achievement across the whole spectrum of life, and community service.
And you don’t even have to be an alum to be considered. Faculty and staff are also eligible, such as another of this year’s inductees, long-time educator and current New Haven Board of Education secretary Dr. Edward Joyner.
He recalled that his first paid teaching job was elucidating United States history — the real history, he pointed out to a reporter, including slavery, the good, bad, and the ugly — in the exciting and heady years of the late 1960s when Lee High first opened its doors.
Under the motivational leadership of Lee’s first principal Dr. Robert Schreck, the atmosphere, Joyner recalled, was like a real “E pluribus unum” with a real unum, meaning that all the different ethnic and racial groups, comprising some 1,600 students divided into four “houses,” who flocked to the school also shared in a strong common sense of school and community, where both athletics and academics thrived.
“It was like a renaissance of history teaching,” Joyner recalled, suggesting also that while the “pluribus” is alive and well today in the city schools (and everywhere) there’s a serious deficit of “unum,” the sense of community, caring, and family that was unique to Lee High, he said, especially in its tumultuous first decade.
The Hall of Fame is the brainchild of Dr. Pamela Monk Kelley, who is an alum (Lee ’73), a former teacher at Lee, and still on the faculty of the New Haven Public Schools.
Her memories of Lee are close to storybook: She met her future husband, Larry Kelley, there. They were 14 and 15 years old. He was a basketball star and she became head cheerleader.
She also recalled that the creation of Lee High was, in part, a response to the race riots of the late 1960s and an attempt to create an inner-city school that was also an all-city school, one that was so familial that parents were welcome in the classroom; a place where kids from the whole of the Elm City flocked.
And they did.
“You got two educations for the price of one,” recalled another of the organizers of the event, Stu Katz (Lee ’79), who has had a long career as a TV producer.
“You got the science and the history,” he said, “but you also got exposure to an environment where everyone is not the same. That’s a great benefit of New Haven Public Schools,” he said, and that ability — to interact with all kind of people who don’t look like yourself — was a huge plus for him in his career, he reported.
Less grand but equally affecting memories also percolated enthusiastically among the attendees.
For example, Jan Wolf Braunstein (Lee ’71) remembered the pleasures of being on the tennis team, playing in the band, being an officer of her junior class.
Peter Evans, a long time boys basketball coach at the schools, recalled the 1976 season when Lee went all the way to the Connecticut state championship and prevailed. And this in the face of two other city perennial basketball powerhouses, Wilbur Cross and James Hillhouse high schools.
How did that happen? a reporter asked. Not to de-emphasize the importance of coaching, but did you have a super star?
Student and teacher after 20 years: Shirley Neighbors and Arelious Heggie.
It turns out Lee did: Sly Williams (Lee ’76), who went on to spend several seasons with the New York Knicks.
Williams was inducted into the Lee-Career Hall of Fame in 2022.
For a full roster of this year’s inductees, click here.
And for more information about both the Hall of Fame, which inducts on a biennial basis, and other activities of the Lee-Career Alumni Association, here’s the site.