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LeClerc describes himself as a "dull" student in grammar school.
"There were a lot of reasons," he says. "One was that my grammar school class had 52 children with one nun — and no one teacher had time for anyone. Then I went to a boys' high school where classes were relatively small, and I found an excitement and passion for learning."
The high school, located in Flushing, N.Y., was taught by the Brothers of the Holy Cross — and it was there LeClerc came upon the first teacher to inspire him, Brother Paul Schowyer, who taught Latin.
The family's modest fortunes received a severe blow when Louis LeClerc died of a brain tumor at the age of 45. LeClerc, then in his second year of high school, was able to finish his education thanks to a scholarship from the school's mothers' club.
Holy Cross seemed an obvious choice for the intellectual and pious young man.
"I visited the campus as a high school junior, walked the campus and kind of fell in love with it," he says. "It was fabulous. It seemed impressive, dignified, serious."
The Holy Cross of 1959 was a far cry from the school of today. Those days were not only pre-coed, LeClerc jokes, but also "pre-Enlightenment."
"It was very monastic, two Jesuits on each floor, Mass every day, and attendance taken," he recalls. "It was a very rigid, closed, almost hermetically sealed world philosophically and theologically."
At the time, he recalls, even the mothers of students were not allowed in the dormitories. But, despite the strictness, it was on Mount St. James that LeClerc found the second great teacher of his career, French professor, Rev. Alfred Desautels, S.J. The Jesuit, a Voltaire scholar, read to LeClerc's class a chapter of Candide.
"It's a famous chapter in which Candide and his sidekick are in South America," LeClerc remembers. "Candide thinks he has murdered a Jesuit, though he hasn't. They flee and are caught by aboriginal people, who put them in a cauldron and start chanting, ‘Let's eat some Jesuit.' So there was a Jesuit in a black robe reading this passage to us. I thought it was amazing."
The young premed student, though impressionable, was devout, and knew that Candide was on the church's index of books that couldn't be read.
"I didn't want to commit a mortal sin," he says, "so I wrote to the bishop of Worcester and asked permission. He granted it. That whole experience — writing and getting the permission, eating the forbidden fruit — started my own intellectual liberation. I was slogging away at chemistry, physics and biology, but on the side I was reading great classics of French literature."
He hungrily began reading more modern French writers, including Sartre and Camus. That Christmas break, LeClerc told his family he wanted to change his major to French, but they were opposed to the move.
"They talked me out of it," he says. "I stuck with premed, although it wasn't a happy choice. It didn't square with my aptitude. It was an exceedingly rigidly defined curriculum. In four years I only once chose a course, and that was in senior year."
In Worcester, LeClerc spent time at the Worcester Art Museum and Higgins Armory. Also fond of music, he used to visit St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer to listen to the Gregorian chants. For a change from the dining hall food, he liked to eat at the Miss Worcester Diner on Southbridge Street — a place he returned to with some nostalgia during his 40th class reunion.
"I believe they still had the same mugs," he remarks wryly.
Keeper of the Books, continued >>>
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