By Laura Freeman ‘96
Every Monday night, Mike Dante pulls up a chair at the Northern Virginia Juvenile Detention Center and talks or plays a game of cards with folks 60 years his junior.
His card partners and he have little in common. William Michael “Mike” Dante ’57 is a former Navy man with a Ph.D. in physics, whose life adventures have taken him from the mountains of Idaho to a war-torn region of Nigeria; to secret government projects from California to the Pentagon. Many of the teenagers, however, have never left their neighborhoods. Despite their differences, Dante’s regular presence persuades the teens that he is an attentive listener and an unlikely ally. For his part, Dante says the teens have kept him in touch with pop culture and the realities of city life. “I enjoy interacting with the kids—it keeps me young,” he says.
Mentoring young people is just one chapter in Dante’s story and his lifelong dedication to service. During the course of his career, he has taken on the roles of teacher, sailor who hardly ever went to sea, civil servant, foster parent and counselor to disadvantaged youth. Acutely aware of the financial obstacles many young people face, Dante is creating a scholarship fund that will help make a Holy Cross education more attainable for promising students whose financial circumstances might otherwise discourage them from applying.
Established with an $800,000 gift, the Dante Family Scholarship honors Dante’s father, Lee Fischer Dante ’33—a lawyer and professor who worked for the Corporation Counsel’s Office in Washington, D.C.—and his late uncle, John Henry Dante ’36, a paleontologist whose work studying fossil fish ear bones sparked Mike Dante’s interest in science.
“These scholarships truly do make a difference for so many students,” says Lynne Myers, director of financial aid. “The recipients understand that coming to Holy Cross is a transforming experience, and they deeply appreciate what the generosity of donors like Mike Dante means for their futures.”
Around the world and back again
Dante came to Holy Cross on a ROTC scholarship—and, while studying physics and receiving Navy training, he volunteered to teach a C.C.D. course in Worcester—the first of what would become an extensive series of volunteer and civil service activities.
After graduation, Dante spent three years working as a naval officer scientist for the National Security Agency, and then spent a summer working as a fire lookout for the U.S. Forest Service.
“They put me on a horse and loaded my food and gear on mules, dropped me off at the top of the mountain, and took the animals back with them,” he recalls. Dante spent his first few solitary nights spooked by sounds of wildlife, but soon grew accustomed to visits from friendly creatures looking for snacks.
“Ground squirrels really like pie,” he says.
Dante earned his master’s degree in physics at Berkeley and a Ph.D. at the University of Washington before teaching at Pacific University. Then, while attending a Physical Society meeting, Dante’s wanderlust flared up again.
“I saw a sign that said, ‘Would You Like to Live in Africa?’” Dante recalls. “So I signed up!”
He received orientation and his pay from TransCentury Corporation—a private company working for U.S.A.I.D.—and moved to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where he spent three years teaching physics at the nation’s university.
Dante’s next stop was Uyo, Nigeria, the epicenter of the Biafran War. With bullet-pocked buildings and the ruins of tanks and planes as a backdrop, he organized and equipped the physics department at the College of Education (using UNESCO funds) and helped start the transformation of the standard teaching method—from strict rote to a more organic form of learning.
“I would tell the students Newton’s three laws, but I would speak too rapidly for them to write down the information,” Dante says. “They were completely flustered—and asked me to repeat myself but I would phrase it differently each time. Eventually they began to realize that I wanted them to understand the ideas rather than just memorize the words.”
When Dante returned to the United States in the late 1970s, he taught briefly at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo before joining the Flight Test Center at Edwards Air Force Base as an electronics engineer. In 1988 he returned to the Washington, D.C., area to take a position with the Defense Testing and Evaluation Agency. His final major job as a civil servant involved working at the Office of Live Fire Testing in the Pentagon, a position he describes as “every young boy’s ideal job.” He spent his days having aircraft pummeled with live fire, then directing the contractors to redesign the planes to give the occupants the best possible chance of surviving hostile fire. During the development of the “Star Wars” defense program, Dante was dispatched to White Sands, N.M., to observe the collision of kinetic energy missiles with Russian ICBMs stripped of the contents of their warheads.
Launching minds
Throughout his experiences in teaching, civil service and counseling, Dante continually exercised the intellectual curiosity and devotion to community service instilled on Mount St. James. Now retired, he takes classes at George Mason University; he has also spent several years volunteering at Covenant House, while continuing his work with juveniles in detention. When Dante came back to campus last June for his 50th reunion, he made the decision to create a scholarship that would help launch future Holy Cross students.
Dante says his Holy Cross education has held him in good stead throughout his career and helped cultivate the service ethic that drew him into rewarding volunteer activities. Grateful for the ROTC aid that made his education possible, he hopes the new scholarship will give future students the same chance to cultivate a broad and sophisticated base of knowledge that can lead to exciting opportunities. More importantly, he hopes it will help them become “men and women for others”—wherever their careers may take them.
Laura Freeman ’96 is a freelance writer from Wilbraham, Mass.
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