Charles O'Leary

The singular most important event in my life was learning to read.

High School was undistinguished, I was neither a good student nor a good athlete.  The real highlight  of the years at John Bapst was making friends, the likes of which I would never meet or experience again.

Immediately after graduation I attended St. Michael's College in Winooski, Vermont. It was here I learned how to study.  Regretably, I ran out of money at the end of my second year and at the urging of Guy "Booga" Carroll I shipped out as a crew member on a Mobil Oil tanker.

In the mid fifties this was a wonderful and life shaping experience. I worked six months at sea followed by one month off.  Six months to read and travel with room and board provided by Standard Oil.  What a Deal! Curacao, Panama and the Canal, Texas oil towns and storms off Cape Hatteras and all of this with wonderful books to read provided by the New York public library.

Toward the end of the fities I returned to school and graduated from the University of Maine.  I stayed an extra year at Maine to study History and finish a masters degree.  I then taught school for several years at Winslow High School and Thomas College.  It was at this time that I romanced and married my student teacher-Pam Braley of Augusta and like me a graduate of the University of Maine.

Just prior to my marriage I was awarded a Fulbright grant and studied at the American U:niversity in Beirut, Lebanon.  One of my mentors during that year, 1964, was Charles Malik who was the former President of the UN general assembly and Foriegn Minister of Lebanon. Oh what a time, Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East in those days and was a center of intrigue, banking and the brewing tribalism that would blossum into War and civil war in the years that followed.

During the Kennedy years I worked as a community action director in the War on Poverty. It was in this capacity that I made contact with and worked closely with the leaders of organized labor.  I went to work for the Maine AFl-CIO in 1967 and labor became my life's work. I became President of the Maine AFL-CIO in 1979 and stayed in that positon until my retirement in 1999.

It hasn't all been fun but it's all been interesting.  During my retirement I have been raising two grandaughters who both suffer from varying degrees of mental illness. Both of these wonderful girls have taught me how lucky I have been and how much more there is to learn.

I am so looking forward to seeing my oldest friends.

E-mail address: Chick58@aol.com