Louis Kovari, algebra teacher, hero
In September 1968, when I was eight years old, I began a five-year stint at Calasanctius Preparatory School, a private school in Buffalo, NY run in the main by a group of Hungarian expatriates, most of them Catholic priests in the Piarist order.
The school had been founded to educate gifted children, but its diverse and vibrant curriculum would have benefitted just about any kid. In my first year there I studied Russian, Greek and Roman mythology, ancient history, algebra, geology, choral singing, and a few other topics outside the usual realm of third-grade pedagogy. The next year I added biology and Japanese to the list. There were electives in Latin, Hindi, sitar, film-making, and lots of other fun topics. Each year each class would be loaded onto a bus and driven somewhere for two or three weeks: Appalachia, Florida, the West, New England — with stops along the way to broaden our impressions of the world’s biological, sociohistorical, and touristological aspects.
It was a good school overall and I loved and hated it and got horrible grades for the most part and am desperately glad I went.
For my first couple of years there my math teacher was Father Kovari, a man who had moved to the US in the wake of the abortive revolution in Hungary in 1956. He was utterly terrifying at first — a brooding, intense man who physically resembled Charles Bronson, at least before he grew his foot-long beard — but as soon as he started talking to me, my fear utterly vanished. Louis Kovari could spit nails, but he loved children. He was a born teacher, with a grandfatherly aspect at quite a young age.
I’ve successfully repressed most of my memories of classroom time spent at that school, but I have clear memories of Father Kovari walking the woods he owned in the Allegheny mountains, showing me the shell of a house he was building. He’d poured a foundation of hexagonal cells, and was pleased that I knew why he’d chosen the design without being told. I also remember his coughing, regularly and in prolonged bouts. He smoked more than anyone I’ve known since, and it was the smoking that did him in far too young.
I learned something new about Louis Kovari today, something that he did a few months before I met him. He’d never mentioned it to anyone else, as far as I know.
Bruce Fisher, a professor at Buffalo State College, was about five years ahead of me at Calasanctius. In April 1968 he was on one of those weeks-long field trips with Father Kovari as a chaperone. Fisher recounts the story on his blog: I’ve excerpted more of it below than is normally my habit, because I just wasn’t sure how else to do it.
We were on the ninth-grade field trip. Thirty or so 13- and 14-year-olds, a taciturn Hungarian priest, and a married pair of teachers had ridden a yellow bus down to the Everglades in the spring of 1968. On the day in April 1968 after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, we were driving toward a Catholic school in Atlanta on whose gymnasium floor we were planning to sleep, white girls and black girls and Jewish girls on the Mrs. Teacher side of the gym, us heathen savage boys watched over by Father Kovari and Mr. Teacher on our side.
There was trouble in America as we drove north. The city of Atlanta was burning that night, as in a war, but I hadn’t ever seen a war, so it was like a movie to me. I thought at first that it was a bunch of slag-pours at a long line of steel plants, because back home in Buffalo, nighttime was when they poured slag onto the ground, right at the shore of the lake, and when we drove home at night to our Yankee clapboard village, we would watch the slag-pours. It was like a lava flow, and there was fire. But it wasn’t steel mills in Atlanta. I remember wondering why Father Kovari, who had spent the trip in a t-shirt, was opening up his suitcase and putting his priest collar on as we sat in traffic. There was a line of cars ahead of us, but it wasn’t just traffic. We looked out the windows and saw a lot of fire, and it wasn’t far away. We were being stopped at a made-up roadblock, a couple of cars narrowing the road, by some white men with clubs, men who wanted to come onto the bus to see if we had any Negroes with us. We did.
I didn’t really understand what was going on when our chaperone, the Hungarian-born math teacher, bounded out of the bus, speaking sharply in Hungarian to Father Kovari, who shut the door tight behind him. The teacher went outside alone. It didn’t go well. He took abuse from the men outside for refusing to let the thugs come up the steps and into the bus itself. It was unpleasant to look out the window and see a man pushing him while other men with clubs or ax-handles stood by. Then the teacher’s wife was yelling, too, and kids were moving around in the bus.
Somehow, my pack-rat mother kept my notes about all this. I did not know then all that was going on, but I know now that April 1968 was only a dozen years after the math teacher had done some street-fighting, in faraway Budapest, when he’d been a schoolboy of 14 or 15, just like me. I know now that our math teacher hadn’t battled freckled bullies, but that he had hurled cobblestones at Soviet tanks, and had been shot at by uniformed soldiers who shot other civilians dead, and I know that he’d escaped the police dogs chasing him when he barely outran them at the Austrian border, back in November 1956, after the tanks had crushed the Hungarian Revolution. In Atlanta that night, I knew that he was in a confrontation, and made notes on it. I sensed that he was being brave. Now, in retrospect, I am awed that his bravery was so instantaneous, and so effective: The Negro-hunters didn’t get on the bus, because he wouldn’t let them. Meanwhile, we kids had followed Father Kovari’s instructions, and had hidden Karen, Beverly, Michellem and John under our duffel bags in the center aisle. (The priests of our school were allies of two Righteous Gentiles who made Buffalo their home, Dr. Clara Ambrus, who lived two doors from school, and Tibor Baransky, whose sons went to our school. Those folks got Yad Veshem recognition for hiding Jews from the Nazis.) Luckily, it was dark, late, and hard to see, but we pressed ourselves up against the windows, everybody whispering, wanting to keep those guys from seeing in. Luckily, there were cars behind us. They waved us through. My notes don’t record whether we slept on the gym floor that night, or kept driving.
I have long known it was a privilege to know the man, but it’s clear I have no real idea how much a privilege it was.
Comments
I wonder how many heroes I have met in my 62 years. I don’t know for sure, but I would bet that it’s a large number. And I would further bet that none of the people I have known who have made a show of acting heroic are among them.
Wow! What an awesome dude!!
Father Kovari was a true friend. When I was working at the school, he would come sit in the office kitchen and we would chat about anything & everything. I would say he is one of the main people I miss from there.
oh my. your story was wonderful; this is amazing.
This posting made it to a google alert I set up for Atlanta Hungarian because I organize a Hungarian club here. I loved both of your stories and think you should post it on The Gulyas Pot! http://thegulyaspot.com/site/ I am forwarding the link to the woman who runs that website. Thank you so much for blogging about this story. It was very moving. Anne
While I too remember Fr Kovari fondly from my time at Calasanctius in the early ‘60s, I’m afraid that you have misread Bruce Fisher’s piece.
We were on the ninth-grade field trip. Thirty or so 13- and 14-year-olds, a taciturn Hungarian priest, and a married pair of teachers had ridden a yellow bus down to the Everglades in the spring of 1968…
I didnt really understand what was going on when our chaperone, the Hungarian-born math teacher, bounded out of the bus, speaking sharply in Hungarian to Father Kovari, who shut the door tight behind him. The teacher went outside alone. It didnt go well. He took abuse from the men outside for refusing to let the thugs come up the steps and into the bus itself. It was unpleasant to look out the window and see a man pushing him while other men with clubs or ax-handles stood by. Then the teachers wife was yelling, too, and kids were moving around in the bus.
Fr Kovari remained on the bus and closed the door tightly behind the Math Teacher who went outside to confront the men. The Math Teacher was in fact Eugene Hegedus of whom I also have good memories from earlier school field trips. You can read more about him Here:
http://buffalowoodzoo.wordpress.com/2008/04/22/for-whom-freedom-is-a-precious-commodity/
And Here:
http://graycliff.bfn.org/feb399.html
And Here:
http://www.buffalospree.com/archives/2009_05/0509coolstuff.html
Hi Paul!
Thanks for filling in the blanks about Gene Hegedus’ heroism. I had Hegedus as a math teacher as well, and am gratified to learn the identity of the “other math teacher.”
If Fisher had identified Mr. Hegedus in his piece, my post may well have had a different focus.
But I did in fact read the story the way correctly, though it may not have been clear from my writing. I see distinct heroism in Father Kovari’s actions, the (apparently) cool-headed directive to the kids to protect their fellows. That’s the heroism to which I referred.
The piece might also have been fairly nuanced with Gene Hegedus as a focus, as my last interaction with him though I do recall him more or less fondly involved my being a guest on a call-in radio show in Buffalo, talking about draft registration and my own individual resistance to same, and having Gene call in not to disagree with me, but to berate the host for having the temerity to help me spread my scurrilous and treasonous views.
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