An Open Letter To Mr. Aidone

Hey there, ah, heh-heh, how's it going? Glad to see you made it to 2009! I see you know the ol' Googling-Your-Own-Name-Trick. Excellent. And how proud you must have been when as you were waiting to see why your name was here, the blog's banner came up with a picture of a graffitied wall with "Clem Sux" written on it. Uh, heh-heh, I can explain that. You see, uh, ok, it's like this...um...OK, I got nothing. It's my brother's fault, though. He drew it. And, um, in the first ever posting of this blog when I said you were "the decidedly "Bad Cop" in the Good Cop/Bad Cop thing he and Mr. Hughes, the principal, had going on", ok, that was my brother's idea too. And the cheating on a chemistry test thing? Yeah, you know this is all just for fun and entertainment, right?

In all seriousness, you seem to be generating a lot of comments to your comments. Everyone at the WPSG blog enjoys hearing from people from the past. Even though you were the heavy hand of the law back in the day, I haven't heard from anyone yet that truly didn't like you. Everyone seems to think you were a pretty fair guy, even if you scared the crap out of us when we got caught doing stuff. So, well done, sir. Actually, most of our shenanigans occured outside of school. I also think that while we were pretty high in food chain from about 1980-1984 or so, relative to the Bergs, Yanatellis, McGills, Fuscos, Malarkys...we were pretty small potatoes in the trouble department. I would love to read a memoir about all the tom foolery that occurred at James I. O'Neill, but that just can't happen, can it?

On the plus side, none of us (that I know of - not all members are accounted for) in the West Point Skateboard Gang are in jail or turned out to be mass-murderers! We turned into responsible (for the most part), productive citizens and parents. A couple of us have "Dr." in front of our names (certainly not me, though), and at least 4 of us (including me) are in education. While you weren't a favorite teacher to any of us, you represented authority, and even if we were scared of you or we "fought the law" by writing "Clem Sux" every once in a while on a desk, your presence was memorable enough to be discussed in the first ever posting here. So good luck and stop on by here any time you'd like!

Hey, one last thing. You know those letters from their parents students were supposed to have in order to use the smoking patio? My brother's was total bullshit! My parents would have freaked if they had known he was smoking in school (those were the days, huh?). I think he should be suspended.