News Article

By Claire M. Regan | For the Staten Island Advance
Lawrence (Larry) Ambrosino, an educator, athlete, coach and community leader who spent a lifetime championing the legacy of a police officer killed in the line of duty, succumbed to a two-year battle with cancer today at home in Annadale. He was 72.

The lifelong Staten Islander raised awareness about Police Officer Rocco Laurie, a childhood friend who was ambushed and killed with his partner in Manhattan in 1972. Ambrosino worked to get Intermediate School 72 in New Springville named for the fallen officer, and established a scholarship program in his name that continues today.

Ambrosino’s passion was coaching and mentoring children, especially those in under-served communities. He stayed in touch with many of them through adulthood.

A graduate of New Dorp High School and Wagner College, he began his career as a teacher before he was appointed principal of PS 57 in Clifton at the age of 32, becoming the youngest principal in New York City. He later served as superintendent of schools in Shrewsbury, N.J., a post which he held for 10 years.

Ambrosino was a founder and chairman of the Staten Island Sports Hall of Fame and served as president of the Staten Island Council of the Boy Scouts of America.

A complete obituary will follow in the Staten Island Advance/SILive.com.

By Jay Price/Special to the Advance/SILive.com

Larry Ambrosino, who fought his way out of the Mariners Harbor Houses, sometimes literally, to run public schools on Staten Island and in Shrewsbury, N.J. – and, even more famously, pushed the city into naming one in memory of his friend, the martyred New York City cop Rocco Laurie – left us Friday morning, after a years-long battle with leukemia and its myriad lethal accomplices.

He was 72, and his death leaves the Island in short supply of what sportswriters used to call moxie.

He was a tough guy, and the first to tell you toughness ran in the family, starting with his mother, who raised two sons in the projects all by herself; and passed down by his older brother, a Marine combat veteran who taught him to stick up for the underdog.

Dying might’ve been the first thing he did quietly. Built like the football lineman he was, with a motor to match, Ambrosino’s reach extended beyond the classroom to the worlds of sports and journalism, the business and non-profit communities, and politics – the local Democratic party once drafted him to run for borough president – and into every neighborhood and social stratum on the Island.

“That’s part of what made him unique,” Lou Bergonzi, a retired Advance sports editor and, like Ambrosino, a founding father and chairman of the Staten Island Sports Hall of Fame, said recently.

“He could relate to everybody.”

RELATIONSHIPS GREW INTO SOMETHING LIKE FAMILY

When he was still a kid, Ambrosino organized neighborhood basketball and baseball teams, coached them, and cajoled local merchants into becoming sponsors. His Explorer Post 17 teams went to – and won – national competitions. More to the point, the players went on to be cops, firemen, teachers and coaches, role models to the generations coming up behind them. And some of those relationships grew into something like family.

“Like father and son,” Mark Washington, a retired fireman and former basketball coach at Tottenville High School, said.

It wasn’t an accident that sports were a constant in his life. As a freshman commuting to Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, the academic jewel of the city, Ambrosino spotted a friend carrying a gold leather helmet. “You should come to New Dorp and play football with us,” Gary Thompson told him; and so he did.

He got there in time to be part of an iconic team, Sal Somma’s 1964 undefeated city champions. A college back injury would end his playing career; but by then the die had been cast. “Playing football at New Dorp changed my life,” he’d say years later, on his way into the school’s Alumni Foundation Hall of Fame.

RISING STAR IN THE SCHOOL SYSTEM

He was 32 – a rising star in the school system at a time when it didn’t hurt if the school disciplinarian was the biggest guy in the building, and some vice-principals kept a wooden paddle around the office, just for effect – when he was named principal at PS 57 in Clifton. That made him the youngest principal in New York City.

He arrived to find a building in crisis, stayed 18 years, and made the Hubert Humphrey School an island of stability in a turbulent neighborhood.

His next stop couldn’t have been more different. Shrewsbury was a village of manicured lawns and upscale stores, where responsibility for the borough’s lone school was split between a principal and superintendent. Ambrosino combined the two jobs into one, built a new gym, and established a reputation as that rarest of men in 21st-Century education, an administrator who stood behind his teachers.The whole time, he always seemed to have a side hustle – sportswriter; gym owner; host of his own community television show. A gig selling home gyms meant brushes with Hollywood gentry and New York sports stars. Ambrosino went to spring training with the Yankees, and to Israel with a team of NBA stars. Decades later, when Union County dedicated a field to former Met manager Jeff Torborg, Ambrosino and his family were invited guests.

The foray into politics didn’t go well. The local Democratic organization botched the collection of signatures on a nominating petition and Ambrosino’s name was struck from the ballot, leaving incumbent Guy Molinari to romp to the second of his three terms in Borough Hall.

Even in what passed for “retirement,” Ambrosino found himself running the Island branch of March of Dimes; and SINY, a consortium dedicated to making Staten Island a destination for visitors. He knew everybody, and for the right cause, or the right person, there was no door he wouldn’t knock on, no favor he wouldn’t call in. And, for sure, he was one of the first guys you called to help start a Staten Island Sports Hall of Fame. “If you don’t ask,” he’d say, “the answer’s already no.”

ROCCO LAURIE GAME

None of it compares to the way he stepped up when Rocco Laurie was killed in the winter of 1972, shot in the back on a Manhattan sidewalk with his partner Greg Foster, and then shot some more after they were down, by assassins calling themselves the Black Liberation Army.

The dead cop’s friends organized a benefit basketball game. A few weeks later, determined that Laurie wouldn’t be forgotten once the newspaper headlines faded, Ambrosino organized a second game. Nearly 50 years later, thanks to him, the game goes on, and Staten Island Sports Hall of Fame scholarships are awarded in Laurie’s memory Because of him, the city named a new school, IS 72 in New Springville, the Rocco Laurie School in 1975. And 30 years later, because of him, they renamed it the Patrolman Rocco Laurie School. “So people would know he wasn’t just some politician,” Ambrosino said.

It all came back to him, with interest, these last months, in a hospice room where a Post 17 jacket hung in the window, and guys from the Harbor, and from New Dorp and Wagner, came to trade stories … to listen, mostly … and if some of those stories had grown over the years, nobody mentioned it.

“He did a lot for a lot of guys,” Joe Tetley was saying half-a-century after they played football together at New Dorp and Wagner. “And he took great joy in that. “I think people saw that, and they looked past the stories and the embellishments at what a good guy, and a good friend, he was.

“He did an awful lot of good.”

HE BATTLED TO THE END

He was a battler to the end, even if he tried to pretend it was all an act, designed to spare his wife, Dorothy, or protect his tough-guy reputation. “I have to act brave,” he’d say. “Somebody’s always watching.”

By Graeme Macpherson @Graeme_Macphers

NOT everyone saw The Shot Heard ‘Round The World. Frank Sinatra was just one of a clutch of celebrities packed inside the Polo Grounds on October 3, 1951 to watch his beloved New York Giants clinch baseball’s National League pennant against local rivals the Brooklyn Dodgers.
When Bobby Thomson, the Glaswegian batter, struck his three-run home run to send the Giants to the World Series, however, Sinatra was temporarily distracted. His friend, the actor Jackie Gleason, had just been sick all over his lap.

“Here is one of the all-time classic games and I don’t see Bobby Thomson hit that home run,” lamented Ol’ Blue Eyes years later.
The first baseball game to be broadcast on television throughout the United States, the home run catapulted Thomson to national stardom.
John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac wrote about the game’s famous denouement. Fellow author Don De Lillo used the story of the game-winning ball as the basis of his book Underworld. The contest was also referenced in The Simpsons while the commentary played on the radio as Sonny Corleone was gunned down in The Godfather.

On the tenth anniversary of Thomson’s death, it remains one of the most iconic moments in American sporting history.
“The home run is still considered one of the great moments in American sports, and still right towards the very top for baseball,” revealed Jay Price of the Staten Island Sports Hall of Fame, the New York borough where the Thomson family settled after leaving Scotland.
Thomson was known throughout his career as the Staten Island Scot and was one of the first inductees to the Hall. There is now an ambassador award presented in his honour each year.
“To fully understand the immensity of the moment, it helps to know that it came at the climax of the fiercest and most improbable pennant chase the game has seen, between teams that shared the same fanbase and a genuine dislike for each other, at a time when baseball was truly the National Pastime; and when New York, with three teams, was the centre of the baseball universe,” added Price.

“The deciding game was one of the first sporting events televised nationally, and it was broadcast around the globe on Armed Forces Radio.
“Thanks to that one swing, Thomson is certainly the Staten Island Sports Hall of Fame’s best-known inductee, despite the presence of multiple Olympians, All-Americans, and Super Bowl champions. And, especially among those Staten Islanders old enough to have known him, the best-loved.”
Born in the Townhead area of Glasgow, Thomson moved to the United States with his family when he was just two years old.
There the old-fashioned Scots values of parents James and Elizabeth and his five elder siblings would continue to shape his life, even despite the nationwide attention that followed his game-winning swat – some of it negative after subsequent accusations that the Giants had cheated.

Good or bad, Thomson remained a humble figure throughout the hysteria. “It’s just a home run,” he once shrugged.
“It’s been our experience that the biggest sports stars of Bobby’s generation were often among the most gracious, and Bobby was the epitome of that,” added Price, a former sportswriter, author and fellow inductee in the Hall of Fame.
“A lot of [his humility] came from his father, who taught all his children not to make themselves the centre of attention and to “do what’s right”.
“I don’t think Bobby ever thought of those things as corny; and as the youngest, he heard them reinforced by his brother and sisters. He was genuinely embarrassed at having jumped onto home plate after his famous home run, which seems quaint compared to the show some guys put on today.

“When he was inducted with the first class of the Staten Island Sports Hall of Fame in 1995, it was up to him to choose his presenter. He could’ve had one of the old Giants players, or any one of a number of celebrities who would’ve been thrilled to do it.
“But he chose the equipment manager from Wagner College who ran the gas station where Bobby often stopped on his way to the Polo Grounds. He did it because he thought it would mean something to the other guy.”
Despite his legendary status in the United States, Thomson remains relatively unknown in his homeland, although he was voted into the Scottish Sports Hall of Fame in 2003.
The man himself, who passed away aged 86 on August 16, 2010, would likely have been embarrassed by the fuss.
“He was humble in every regard, and I can’t imagine him ever “big-timing” anyone,” added Price. “I can honestly say that I’ve never met anyone who knew Bobby Thomson, on any level, who had a bad word to say about him.”