Charlie Bucci '48 sits for a formal portrait with his wife, Barbara, and their six children.
Flip through the 1948 yearbook and Charlie Bucci is smiling broadly in just about every picture there is of him. Seventy-six years later as he sits for this Prep magazine interview, not much has changed.
The couch in the cozy apartment he shares with his wife of seventy years, Barbara, is covered with boxes and folders of memorabilia, photos, journals, newspaper clippings, and more, all that show a life brimming with joy.
"But our story has a starting point: the corner of Elliott and Cabot Streets in Beverly, MA, in September of 1944."
“I was shocked to learn I was going to St. John’s, because I knew nothing about it. Had never heard of it,” says Bucci, a Beverly native. The son of a grocer, he explains he was perfectly happy going to his local public schools, which up until then had included Prospect School for his elementary years and Briscoe Junior High School for eighth grade. Though Bucci doesn’t recall why his parents decided to send him to St. John’s, he does remember not questioning the decision. “I don’t understand why I didn’t fight it. But anyway, I accepted the fact that I was going to go to St. John’s.”
"So in September of 1944, Bucci left his home on Dearborn Avenue, walked directly past Beverly High School—at that time located at the intersection of Sohier Road and Colon Street—watching longtime friends and classmates file into the building, and set out for the corner of Elliott Street and Cabot Street where he hopped a bus that would take him to Danvers. He then walked about a mile up the road to his new campus.
Now, let’s pause a moment to take a look around campus as it was in the fall of 1944. Xavier Hall, Ryken Hall, Memorial Dining Hall, and the Administration Building stood as they do today. Griffin Hall and the McCourt Student Union were located by the football field and behind the Administration Building respectively, though they were each razed in 2002 and 2016. No Memorial Gym yet, no Brother Benjamin Hall, no A.E. Studzinski Library. Ryken Hall housed the School’s boarding students, who came from far flung places like Lima, Peru and Havana, Cuba, in a large wing that has since been demolished. “I was amazed at the idea that people came from so far off,” remembers Bucci. “How did they hear about St. John’s Prep and I never did? Who knows.” Boarding students made up about 50% of the student body, with other boys coming from local towns like Salem, Danvers, and Peabody. And instead of the woodlands surrounding campus today, in 1944, fields fl anked campus on all sides.
Charlie Bucci's senior portrait.
"That was the campus that greeted Bucci as he walked up to the doors of Ryken Hall, dressed in the Prep’s uniform at the time: a shirt, pants, suit coat, and a tie. “By the way,” Bucci adds after explaining the importance of the dress code, “to this day, I still wear a shirt and tie for all occasions.” Much to the amusement of his buddies. Ask Bucci about that time in Vegas where he and Barbara were getting dressed for dinner on the last night of a vacation with their friends. “Barbara said, ‘you’re not going to wear that tie.’ I said ‘yes, I am.’ I wore the tie and went downstairs. The guys are in shorts, they said, ‘you’re not going to wear that tie.’ We get to the restaurant, Don puts his hands over my eyes, says ‘don’t move, Charlie.’ Then Frank cuts the tie. But that’s Vegas.”
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. New school, new dress code, and now, new friends.
As they remember it, the five of them—Charlie Bucci ’48, Don Slaven ’48, Frank Davis ’48, Bob Donnelly ’49 P’75 ’82 GP’12, and Stan Hayes ’49 P’77—met the summer before freshman year, when Bucci introduced himself to Slaven at Knights of Columbus Hall dance and mentioned he might go to St. John’s Prep. But it was when they got to school that their friendship grew into something that would last quite literally their lifetimes.
“Frank Davis, Bob Donnelly, Don Slaven, and I were in the choir. I have a picture of all of us as freshmen; we were all placed right near each other.” Hayes, a year younger than the rest, would join St. John’s a year later, but while St. John’s may have been new to the five of them, Bucci was in fact the interloper in the group, as he puts it.
“They had all gone to St. Mary’s together,” he explains, a now-closed Catholic elementary school located on Chapman Street in Beverly. “So although we were all from the same town, Beverly was very regionalized at the time.” Despite the mere three miles between their elementary schools, they never crossed paths until St. John’s.
But soon football started, which Bucci, Slaven, Donnelly, and Davis all played. Classes got underway, and Bucci remembers holding court when his classmates needed help in math and the sciences. Pranks were pulled. “Jim Daley taught history, civics, things like that. He was a track coach and a funny guy; we’d talk about anything with him. He was one of the few lay teachers. There was this kid, Arthur Bean. Played piano for the choir. All of a sudden it comes up that Arthur Bean’s never been thrown out of class. Class comes around again and Jim asks about Arthur, ‘He bothering you guys up there?’ Of course we say yes. Arthur gets thrown out of class. You have to be thrown out of class at least once.”
Against the backdrop of his freshman year, World War II played out across Europe and Asia. “I followed that religiously in the paper,” says Bucci. “I followed George Patton across Europe. I was getting to be 14, 15 years old, close to the draft age, and started to worry when they occupied France. In my mind, England was next, and then the U.S. would go.” But despite the magnitude of the international aairs that occupied much of the news, the carpool Bucci joined had other things on their minds: baseball.
“My father found someone who was driving to school and looking for riders. It was usually some of the guys—Davis, Slaven—in the car. The talk was always baseball. You were either a Braves fan [the team called Boston home from 1871 to 1952] or a Red Sox fan. We were all Red Sox fans except for Frank; I remember more about the Braves than the Red Sox to this day because Frank could outlast us all with Braves players’ names, batting averages, how many RBIs, all those stats.”
"Walking through the halls of Xavier Hall when Bucci did, one would naturally notice another difference between then and now: nearly all of the teachers and administrators were Xaverian Brothers. When asked if the Brothers had an in uence on his life, the answer couldn’t be more simple: “Yes.”
"“Very much. There were three parts to the Brothers: the intellectual, the physical, and the soul,” says Bucci. “They excelled in all three areas. They were coaches, they were teachers of course, and they lived religious life. My life would’ve been very different without knowing them.”
Bucci remembers Br. Joe Gerard, C.F.X. was a particular favorite. “The way he taught English, it was like Humphrey Bogart playing the lead.” He also remembers there was a bit of discord—the Class of 1947 dedicated the yearbook to Br. Gerard. “We wanted to dedicate our yearbook to him. But I’m sure everyone did. There were other Brothers who were good, if not better, but he was the favorite.”
When it came time to graduate, Slaven and Davis were headed to St. Michael’s College in Vermont, and would be followed by Hayes and Donnelly a year later. Between their elementary education and college, those four would spend a collective sixteen years in school together. Bucci took a slightly different path.
"I was working at the grocery store after graduation—I was taking physics at Newman Prep since that was a requirement for the schools I was looking at. One of the reasons I’m so loyal to St. John’s is because even after waiting a year, the Brothers got me into some of the best colleges in the United States.”
"It was Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY that Bucci eventually settled on. “I was very, very active on that campus,” Bucci says, though he admits he wasn’t so active in classes. So much so in fact, that he flunked out of college his junior year. But, three years of a chemistry degree was just fine by the U.S. Navy, into which Bucci enlisted following his departure from Rensselaer.
But while he was making his way through a one-year electrical program in Chicago and being stationed in Boston, Don Slaven said he had someone he wanted Bucci to meet. So the two high school friends set out on a double date, and that’s where Charlie Bucci met Barbara Bane.
“Barbara will tell you that she wasn’t impressed,” says Bucci with a chuckle. “But eventually I asked her to marry me, and she said ‘yes.’” The two were married on September 6, 1954. Pointing to a black and white photo of the wedding parties, he goes down the line. “That’s Frank Davis, Don Slaven, Bob Donnelly, my cousin, my brother, and me.” Some combination of the five Prep friends were in each others’ weddings, and later, were named godfather to the other’s children. Smiling, Bucci recalls, “Bob Donnelly’s son was 17 years old when he realized that “Uncle” Charlie wasn’t actually related to him.”
What comes next is the kaleidoscope of activity that makes up a life. Barely three weeks after getting married, Bucci was stationed in Saudi Arabia, then outside of Naples, Italy for a year, for which Barbara joined him. Then came their six children: Cynthia, Lisa, Charles, Maryanne, Pamela, and Amy, and the five-bedroom house in Needham the Buccis called home for 43 years. [Don’t think the move was without a Prep connection: Don and his wife, Clare, lived in Needham at the time and convinced the Buccis to relocate.] Luckily, all five of their wives found themselves to be just as close as their husbands.
Bucci receives a round of applause from the newly minted Class of 1974 Gold Eagles at their spring 2024 reunion.
Bucci, who was lined up for a job at GE following his time in the Navy, went back to Rensselaer for a new and completed degree in electrical engineering. He worked in defense electronics for many years before going into business with who but Bob Donnelly. The rest of the crew warned them not to mix money and friendship, but after a decade of success in their legal copying business, the two remained as close as ever.
But what seems to make up most of the stories isn’t business or family matters, but all of the fun times the five of them have had. Vacations to Sedona, Florida, France, China, and visits at Davises’ and Donnellys’ lake front properties in New Hampshire kept the friend group close. Plus that time Don Slaven stole Bucci’s Santa costume.
“Don could never just be invited to a party and simply go,” says Bucci. “He always asked me, ‘so what are we going to do?’ I’d say, ‘what do you mean what are we going to do, we’re going to go to the party.’ But Don always was up to something.” That “up to something” includes stories of dressing up in costume, singing, recreating photos years apart, and more. “We had a camaraderie. You couldn’t have a big ego if you were going to be in this crowd.” You just had to have the right attitude, which all of them had in spades.
Time marched on. Retirements, milestone birthdays, reunions, and great-grandchildren came. Bucci picked up the family tradition of being Santa Claus in the Beverly town holiday parade. [“70 years of Buccis being Santa,” he says. “First my father, then my uncle. Next came me, and then Michael Bucci. We have a proclamation signed by the mayor.”] Helen Davis was the first to pass away, followed by Stan Hayes in 2008, Bob Donnelly in 2014, and Don Slaven in 2019. Barbara Donnelly, Clare Slaven, and Carole Hayes passed away in 2022, 2023, and 2024 respectively. Of the group of ten, only Frank Davis, Bucci, and Barbara Bucci are living. But when asked if that makes him sad, the answer is immediate.
“Sad? No. I’m not a person attuned to sadness. I’m always looking for something to smile about. When I go to the St. John’s reunions now, I make new friends because I sit at a table with guys who are in the same boat as me.”
In the spring of 2024, Bucci attended the Gold Eagle Breakfast in Memorial Dining Hall honoring the Class of 1974. He had the 50th reunion guys beat by 26 years. “Dr. Hardiman came up to me at my 75th reunion and said, ‘I’ll see you at the 80th.’ I said, ‘Oh, I’ll be there.’”
When asked why he’s stayed in touch with his alma mater all these years, it’s not hard to guess at an answer. Deep friendships that have lasted decades, an education that earned him entry into college, a campus to call home. But that’s just a guess, because his answer is uncomplicated, as if nothing could be more obvious.
“I just love the Prep.”
P.S. Faith-based, values-laden education is the DNA of the Xaverian Way. Read more about how the mission of the Brothers continues on at St. John's.
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