Name: Noel Pardo, Director of Campus Initiatives, Tabor Academy

Age: 46

How he got to Tri-Town: Originally from Buffalo, went to Holy Cross. “I was working in Boston, and I applied to several schools. Tabor happened to be one that offered me the ability to coach crew, teach history, and live in the dorms. It really married together.”

Ever met a celebrity locally? Back in the mid-1990s, when he was a young history teacher, his parents came to visit for the first time and he took them out for a boat tour of the harbor. “We get out to the outer harbor, and this person waves me down, I’m like ‘Hey, Mom, Dad, we have to help this guy out.’ We say hello, I start towing him back, and I keep looking – I know this guy! Finally, he says ‘I’m James Spader,’ and I’m like ‘I know James Spader! I know who you are!’ It was kind of embarrassing, he was cool about it. And my parents had no idea who he was.”

Favorite place in Tri-Town? Having lived, worked, and started a family on the Tabor Academy campus for over two decades, it still holds a magical sway. “When I started out, it was ‘Oh, do you believe this place!’ I’m a little used to it now, but not totally.”

By Jonathan Comey

Over 22 years on the Tabor Academy campus in a variety of roles, Noel Pardo has taught and coached an entire generation of unique, unpredictable young people. Every class, every student, every athlete, each with their own way of navigating toward college and beyond.

But one thing never changes. The water.

From the first time he watched an oar slice into the ocean off the Tabor boathouse in 1995, Pardo has been hooked on this idyllic slice of life.

“I don’t know how many people get to live in a town like this,” he said. “You walk around, and it’s so idyllic, you’re like, is this real? There can’t be more than a handful of towns like this in the world.”

As Tabor Academy’s Director of Campus Initiatives and men’s crew coach, Pardo brings a positive energy and obvious passion for the school’s mission.

“I didn’t know about boarding schools until I started working at one,” says Pardo, who lives at Tabor’s Heath House with his wife and three children (two of whom are Tabor students, one of whom is at ORR junior high). “I love the way you are able to work with kids in so many different ways. You might have a kid in the classroom, on the crew team, and then you see the kid in the dorm.

“I think now that I have kids, I realize that at a certain point, no one has more of an impact on your kids than teachers. And I think especially at a place like Tabor, there are a lot of opportunities to affect a young person’s life.

“It is a very powerful role, and there’s a lot of responsibility, but when you get the light bulb to pop off over their head, that’s what it’s about. As many moments as I can have with those kids, the better.”

For Pardo, who rowed collegiately at Holy Cross, the sport of crew is a perfect way to help build a young person’s character.

“There’s no MVP on a crew,” Pardo says. “You’re doing a repetitive cycle of things, and the mastery is: Not only do I have to master my own individual stroke, I have to master everyone’s stroke. I have to follow you, and you have to follow me, and in our boats, where we race with eight, you have to be doing it with seven other guys.”

It’s no easy gig, being part of the Tabor crew: two-hour practices every day for an entire spring, all for eight or ten competitions lasting only about five minutes.

All told, a team has to make about two thousand strokes over the course of the season. Getting each of those strokes in perfect unison is the unattainable – getting as close as possible as you can is the goal.

“If you watch it, there’s a smoothness to it, and the team that has the smoothness is usually the team that’s pulling ahead,” he says. “You can’t be an individual. You can’t be a Michael Jordan on the boat.”

Multiple members of each graduating class traditionally go on to row collegiately, but Pardo uses a different measuring stick for success.

“I want them to be good citizens to other people,” says Pardo. “And I think one of the values that I got out of doing rowing in college is that people were good to other people. People took care of people. Do I like to win? Yes. But it’s not the thing I talk about the most. It’s the team. It’s constantly working toward that goal – we’re going to try and achieve as many good to great strokes as possible.

“Being good to one another, trusting one another – when you see that happening, you get pretty excited as a coach.”

Pardo says he’s never seriously pursued the idea of coaching the sport collegiately. Alluring as it might be, life on the Marion shore proves even more attractive.

“There are times when I’m really into the sport, and I do think about it … but the balance, when you’re living and working here, there’s a cycle and a difference that work hand in hand,” he says.

“Boarding school teachers might not always like the workload, but they’re never bored.”

Standing in front of the small but willing crowd, the actor transports his audience to a place created by a brilliant mind, one visited only in the imagination. The actor then metamorphoses into the educator whose command of the topic is so vast, the student yearns to hear more. And then, in playful discourse, the raconteur shares a humorous aside that unites those in attendance in a conspiracy of thought.

These three attributes are embodied in one person – one Stephen Collins whose presentation at the Marion Council on Aging on August 28 held the audience in rapt attention as he brought Shakespeare to life in Marion.

The hour-long presentation that Collins has crafted of the well-known “Bard” is a smoothly woven dissertation. He weaves explanations of Shakespeare’s writing styles into recitations of long evocative passages from his works with clarity and insight.

Collins is himself a commanding figure. Standing over 6 feet tall, he seamlessly moves with superb extemporaneous recall and expressive body posture through Shakespeare’s life with an eloquence honed from years of studying the subject.

Regarding the controversy around whether or not a man named Shakespeare actually wrote the plays we’ve come to know so well, Collins only offers us the arguments while holding back his own conclusions. Instead, he shares how the language of the plays speaks to an author who truly understood human nature and whose brilliance as a storyteller has never been equaled.

Collins said that in Shakespeare’s day – April 23, 1564 to April 23, 1616 – actors directed plays without a “director” guiding them. This is an interesting thought when contrasted against the over-produced and over-directed entertainment we consume today.

Throughout his presentation, Collins took the time to share long passages from Shakespeare, clearly rejoicing in the words or the turn of a phrase we’ve come to accept as Shakespeare and none other.

Collins also delved into how well the author knew human nature as evidenced over and over again in his words.

And then there are the plots and sub-plots, the hundreds of characters the modern world still hungers to indulge in – from Hamlet to Julius Caesar, from The Tempest to Romeo and Juliet.

Of the venues where plays were enacted, Collins said there were four main theaters: The Fortune, The Swan, The Rose, and The Globe. The latter is the one known to have been Shakespeare’s own. These theaters were all situated outside the city limits of London, as there was a bylaw prohibiting them. These historical tidbits added contextual flavor to Collins’ talk.

Collins further explained that during the years of the black plague when theaters were closed, Shakespeare turned his hand to writing sonnets. He said that in an era of expanding human intellect, it was the poet – not the playwright – who was heralded and esteemed. As such, Shakespeare also excelled.

Diving into a Shakespearean play can be a little intimidating to say the least. Yet Collins, who teaches school-aged children to the more ‘ageless’ students, brings the words and the intentions of the words – nay, the very intentions of the author – to vivid life.

Using only a chair, the floor, and his expressive face and hands, Collins acted out bits and pieces of the famous works, reminding all that “…The world is a stage … Men and women are merely the players…”

Collins is pursuing opportunities to bring not only Shakespeare to local councils on aging but also Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, and other great figures from our literary past. He is also developing a new show on the famous painter Whistler.

And if, perchance, you’ve forgotten just how ingrained Shakespeare is to our collective conscientiousness, consider the following that are used freely in common parlance: “break the ice,” “dead as a doornail,” “good riddance,” “in my heart of hearts,” “in my mind’s eye,” or, “love is blind.” Shakespeare all.

To learn more about Stephen Collins, visit www.unlaunchedvoices.com.

By Marilou Newell

On August 25, Mattapoisett’s tiny town hall was filled with officers from the Massachusetts Department of Transportation and the governor’s office, including Lt. Governor Karyn Polito, to congratulate the Town on receiving a $500,000 grant from D.O.T’s Municipal Small Bridge Program.

And no one was more pleased than the Town’s own highway surveyor, Barry Denham, whose efforts in securing the grant monies for repairs to the Randall Bridge on Acushnet Road proved successful. This latest local bridge in need of repair is located just south of the intersection between Acushnet Road and Hereford Hill Road.

“I wanted us all to meet so we could put faces with names,” Polito said. Around the conference table were State Representative and Chairman of the Joint Committee on Transportation William Straus, Selectman Jordan Collyer, Police Chief Mary Lyons, and Denham. Also present were Mass D.O.T. District 5 members: Shane Sousa, district bridge engineer; Pamela Haznar, district project developer (Haznar is also a Mattapoisett resident); Mary Jo Perry, highway director; and Jonathan Gulliver, highway administrator.

Polito opened the conversation by discussing the governor’s plans to bring state government into partnership with cities and towns throughout the commonwealth.

”The Community Compact is uniting all cities and towns, and through this process, we found there are a lot of municipally owned bridges that don’t qualify for federal aid,” Polito said. Continuing on she said, “These bridges are often in key areas of the towns and when they go down, it’s very disruptive to the community.”

The small bridge program is designed for bridges spanning between 10 and 20 feet in length that are wholly owned by a municipality.

Polito then explained that the program secured $50 million of the $800 million dollar transportation budget and will be distributed over a five-year period specifically to assist communities faced with bridge repair issues.

“We are here today to acknowledge your efforts,” she said addressing Denham, “…along with the state offices from Mass D.O.T. to ensure the project gets off well…. We are here to literally help you and to congratulate you on receiving the maximum grant.”

Gulliver added, “We are happy to give you the maximum amount, and to give you technical assistance from District 5.”

Denham acknowledged the assistance from District 5 when the Town was faced with a catastrophic failure at the Tinkham Bridge, a few miles north of Randall Bridge, also on Acushnet Road.

“It got ahead of us,” Denham told Polito. “We are looking to have a rapid recovery on the Randall Bridge.”

He shared that the bridge currently in question was built in 1933 by highway department personnel for a cost of $250. That comment garnered a round of laughter from the group at the table.

Straus spoke, saying, “The old thing was that towns outside Boston got screwed.” He said the current bill mandates that monies be spread across the Commonwealth. “People are happy with the program.”

Polito said, “I come from central Mass, so I’m sensitive to issues outside Boston.”

She applauded the cooperative efforts taking place now and noted that there are approximately 1,500 small bridges in need of repair.

Lyons said residents will be temporarily disrupted during the repair work on Randall Bridge and that traffic will have to be re-routed and emergency services from bordering towns will be ready to help during the construction phase. She assured everyone that it was “doable.”

Collyer said of the grant that it would allow the Town to redeploy money towards other roadway projects. He explained, “We’ve used retiring debt to keep an even flow of dollars. No one feels the impact with a combination of grants, bonds, and retiring debt.”

Denham discussed the current village street development program the town is currently undergoing. Polito asked if the Town knew about the Complete Street program. “There’s fifty million dollars in grant money through the program,” she said, adding that it uses “best practices” known today for design elements.

Denham responded that while the Town had not yet signed the Complete Street Compact, he had been trained in the process and was using many of those principles on recent roadways projects. Straus said, “Barry knows every inch of pipe and pavement in town!”

Denham said that he hopes to begin repair work on Randall Bridge in the summer of 2018 and that detours during construction should be no more than 30 days.

By Marilou Newell