At Leo High, a Gathering and a Mission

Recently retired Leo High School principal and Alumni Bob Foster in his home in Chicago Wednesday, January 27, 2010.
John Konstantaras/Chicago News Cooperative

A breath-draining climb up three flights of stairs is required to reach the basketball court at Leo High School, but the reward is a trip back through time. Peach baskets would fit the décor of the tiny gym better than the glass backboards that hang there.

The playing floor is closer to 80 feet in length than the regulation 94. The three-point line and the sideline out-of-bounds line nearly meld in the corners, at the base of four rows of well-worn wooden bleachers, where surprised shooters often find themselves if they back up even slightly on their follow-through.

It’s a cozy, black and orange room, roughly the size of a storage closet at Lincoln Way or Neuqua Valley or any of the other lavish gyms at far-flung suburban schools. Be it ever so humble, this den has been home to many good teams and great games during its 84 years of service to Leo’s Lions.

A full house of 800 turned out for Friday’s Catholic League showdown with Brother Rice. The makeup of the crowd was as remarkable as its size — it included about 200 white folks, Leo graduates on an alumni outing, most of them bused in from a Knights of Columbus Hall in the Mount Greenwood neighborhood roughly six miles away, probably as many whites as have been inside the school since the 1980s.

Bob Foster was grateful.

He remembers a much different neighborhood, a working-class enclave of white immigrants, mostly first generation, nearly all Irish. But the summer of 1966 was a time of racial unrest in Chicago, and the black-on-white fatal shooting of a teenager less than a half-mile from Leo High touched off a round of white flight that occurred with supersonic speed. Residents perceived that the Auburn-Gresham neighborhood was no longer was safe. I was a student at Leo then, and by the time classes resumed that fall, the area had gone from all white to almost all black.

Leo, an all-boys Catholic school at 79th and Sangamon, gradually came to reflect the changed demographic as white alumni stopped sending their sons there. The last white students graduated in 1992. Enrollment is less than a quarter of its 1,200-student peak during the school’s heyday as a Catholic League powerhouse, and Leo’s future has long been in question.

But Bob Foster, 69, made it his life’s mission to keep the school open. A former Leo football star whose bent-nose bluntness reflects a lifetime of line play, Foster was Leo’s football coach, principal and president for more than 40 years before stepping down for health reasons earlier this month. Leo was built in 1926 to serve boys from Chicago’s working-class South Side, Foster said, and that mission shouldn’t change just because the makeup of the neighborhood changed from Irish, Italian and Polish immigrants to blacks.

Foster had a small group of deep-pocketed alumni he could call on for help with big-ticket expenses like a new furnace, but the smaller donations he coaxed from the middle-class graduates were the school’s real economic engine. The policemen, firefighters, teachers and tradesmen supported Leo even after they stopped sending their sons. Leo endures as an inner-city symbol of educational opportunity, a haven in a troubled area plagued by gang violence.

The alumni hold banquets, golf outings and decal drives to increase fund-raising, but Friday’s function was personal, an opportunity to see where the money goes and to meet the beneficiaries. Having Brother Rice as the opponent was an added bonus: The schools have been fierce rivals since the ’60s, sharing an Irish Christian Brothers teaching heritage. Rice is at 99th and Pulaski, an area of the Southwest Side that has always seemed like affluent suburbia to Leo students who like to think of themselves as a grittier bunch. Rivalry aside, Rice is where many Leo graduates have been sending their sons for years.

Friday’s crowd, though, was exuberantly pro-Leo, and they yelled themselves hoarse during the Lions’ 76-72 victory, a crackling good game that required overtime. Between the third and fourth quarters, gray-haired white retirees and dread-locked black hip-hoppers stood together to deliver a spirited rendition of the school’s fight song — “Oh when those Leo men fall into line …” — an uplifting display of harmony not often seen in this pocket of the fractious South Side.

Afterward, at Coach Noah Cannon’s behest, the Leo players mixed with the alumni, introducing themselves and shaking hands, a rare intermingling of black and white, old and young. All Leo men. Malcolm McFarland, a senior guard and the team captain, said the Lions enjoyed having the old-timers in the house.

“It was nice,” he said. “We want to show them Leo is as strong as it was when they were here.”

Cannon, a point guard at Leo who graduated in 1995, runs a tight ship and would be in demand at a bigger school if he said the word — he won a state championship at Leo in 2004. Instead, he’s in the forefront of efforts to get alumni from his generation more involved in preserving Leo. He believes he owes his life to the school.

During his senior year, Cannon resisted when three gang members tried to rob him at 79th and Morgan one fall morning, and he bears a hook-shaped scar from the broken whiskey bottle they used to slice open his scalp. Foster, alerted by a younger student who saw the assault, ran a block and a half to where Cannon lay and helped control the bleeding until paramedics arrived and got him to a hospital.

“Mr. Foster saved my life,” Cannon said, “and by being at Leo, I’m giving back. I’m here as long as Leo is here. This is where I’m needed.”