By Jay Price/Special to the Advance/SILive.com
Larry Ambrosino, who fought his way out of the Mariners Harbor Houses, sometimes literally, to run public schools on Staten Island and in Shrewsbury, N.J. – and, even more famously, pushed the city into naming one in memory of his friend, the martyred New York City cop Rocco Laurie – left us Friday morning, after a years-long battle with leukemia and its myriad lethal accomplices.
He was 72, and his death leaves the Island in short supply of what sportswriters used to call moxie.
He was a tough guy, and the first to tell you toughness ran in the family, starting with his mother, who raised two sons in the projects all by herself; and passed down by his older brother, a Marine combat veteran who taught him to stick up for the underdog.
Dying might’ve been the first thing he did quietly. Built like the football lineman he was, with a motor to match, Ambrosino’s reach extended beyond the classroom to the worlds of sports and journalism, the business and non-profit communities, and politics – the local Democratic party once drafted him to run for borough president – and into every neighborhood and social stratum on the Island.
“That’s part of what made him unique,” Lou Bergonzi, a retired Advance sports editor and, like Ambrosino, a founding father and chairman of the Staten Island Sports Hall of Fame, said recently.
“He could relate to everybody.”
RELATIONSHIPS GREW INTO SOMETHING LIKE FAMILY
When he was still a kid, Ambrosino organized neighborhood basketball and baseball teams, coached them, and cajoled local merchants into becoming sponsors. His Explorer Post 17 teams went to – and won – national competitions. More to the point, the players went on to be cops, firemen, teachers and coaches, role models to the generations coming up behind them. And some of those relationships grew into something like family.
“Like father and son,” Mark Washington, a retired fireman and former basketball coach at Tottenville High School, said.
It wasn’t an accident that sports were a constant in his life. As a freshman commuting to Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, the academic jewel of the city, Ambrosino spotted a friend carrying a gold leather helmet. “You should come to New Dorp and play football with us,” Gary Thompson told him; and so he did.
He got there in time to be part of an iconic team, Sal Somma’s 1964 undefeated city champions. A college back injury would end his playing career; but by then the die had been cast. “Playing football at New Dorp changed my life,” he’d say years later, on his way into the school’s Alumni Foundation Hall of Fame.
RISING STAR IN THE SCHOOL SYSTEM
He was 32 – a rising star in the school system at a time when it didn’t hurt if the school disciplinarian was the biggest guy in the building, and some vice-principals kept a wooden paddle around the office, just for effect – when he was named principal at PS 57 in Clifton. That made him the youngest principal in New York City.
He arrived to find a building in crisis, stayed 18 years, and made the Hubert Humphrey School an island of stability in a turbulent neighborhood.
His next stop couldn’t have been more different. Shrewsbury was a village of manicured lawns and upscale stores, where responsibility for the borough’s lone school was split between a principal and superintendent. Ambrosino combined the two jobs into one, built a new gym, and established a reputation as that rarest of men in 21st-Century education, an administrator who stood behind his teachers.The whole time, he always seemed to have a side hustle – sportswriter; gym owner; host of his own community television show. A gig selling home gyms meant brushes with Hollywood gentry and New York sports stars. Ambrosino went to spring training with the Yankees, and to Israel with a team of NBA stars. Decades later, when Union County dedicated a field to former Met manager Jeff Torborg, Ambrosino and his family were invited guests.
The foray into politics didn’t go well. The local Democratic organization botched the collection of signatures on a nominating petition and Ambrosino’s name was struck from the ballot, leaving incumbent Guy Molinari to romp to the second of his three terms in Borough Hall.
Even in what passed for “retirement,” Ambrosino found himself running the Island branch of March of Dimes; and SINY, a consortium dedicated to making Staten Island a destination for visitors. He knew everybody, and for the right cause, or the right person, there was no door he wouldn’t knock on, no favor he wouldn’t call in. And, for sure, he was one of the first guys you called to help start a Staten Island Sports Hall of Fame. “If you don’t ask,” he’d say, “the answer’s already no.”
ROCCO LAURIE GAME
None of it compares to the way he stepped up when Rocco Laurie was killed in the winter of 1972, shot in the back on a Manhattan sidewalk with his partner Greg Foster, and then shot some more after they were down, by assassins calling themselves the Black Liberation Army.
The dead cop’s friends organized a benefit basketball game. A few weeks later, determined that Laurie wouldn’t be forgotten once the newspaper headlines faded, Ambrosino organized a second game. Nearly 50 years later, thanks to him, the game goes on, and Staten Island Sports Hall of Fame scholarships are awarded in Laurie’s memory Because of him, the city named a new school, IS 72 in New Springville, the Rocco Laurie School in 1975. And 30 years later, because of him, they renamed it the Patrolman Rocco Laurie School. “So people would know he wasn’t just some politician,” Ambrosino said.
It all came back to him, with interest, these last months, in a hospice room where a Post 17 jacket hung in the window, and guys from the Harbor, and from New Dorp and Wagner, came to trade stories … to listen, mostly … and if some of those stories had grown over the years, nobody mentioned it.
“He did a lot for a lot of guys,” Joe Tetley was saying half-a-century after they played football together at New Dorp and Wagner. “And he took great joy in that. “I think people saw that, and they looked past the stories and the embellishments at what a good guy, and a good friend, he was.
“He did an awful lot of good.”
HE BATTLED TO THE END
He was a battler to the end, even if he tried to pretend it was all an act, designed to spare his wife, Dorothy, or protect his tough-guy reputation. “I have to act brave,” he’d say. “Somebody’s always watching.”
