TCNJ

21 AFTER GRADUATION, ROSE TAUGHT elementary school in Ewing, but Samuel Sr.'s first post-college job was as a state forest ranger, scouting for signs of Dutch elm disease. "That's why as a kid I could identify every kind of tree in New Jersey," Alito says. Samuel Sr. finally found a teaching job at the State Home for Boys in Jamesburg, and then in the Trenton public schools, before serving as a cryptologist with the Army Air Corps When he was in junior high school, his mother returned to teaching, retiring as principal of Sunnybrae Elementary School in Hamilton in 1984. Samuel Sr. left teaching soon after Samuel Jr. was born and started a new career as a researcher in the New Jersey State House, where he was the first director of the Office of Legislative Services — the scholarly, white-haired, resolutely nonpartisan figure led the "I'm afraid that's genetic," Alito says. Their student-teaching evaluations noted qualities that many observers of Alito's long career in public service have ascribed to him, too. "Mr. Alito has a quiet and composed manner which, together with a reasonable deliberation, is condu- cive to good classroom management and teacher-pupil relationships," Samuel Sr.'s training teacher wrote. "In both his major subjects he seems to have his subject mat- ter well in hand. He plans conscientiously and carefully and carries out the plans that he makes." Of his mother, one training teacher wrote: "Her attitude toward the child is sympathetic, just, and firm. She has high ideals and is a very conscientious and untiring worker." Another wrote: "Miss Fradusco has a very pleasing manner with children. She is tactful in her criticism and leaves them with a happy feeling." And the yearbook revealed that his father's principled stand against segregation had not gone unnoticed. "Through its editorial columns the campus organ has not hesitated to voice its opinion wherever the occasion so demanded," reads the yearbook, citing the national journalism awards the newspaper had won while Samuel Sr. was on the editorial staff. "Always with an eye toward a better change, the Signal editors have complimented, censured, suggested, recommended, and criticized student issues and educational problems of the day." A week after Samuel Sr.'s editorial ran, the Wilson basketball team traveled to New Jersey for a rematch. State's black player, Lloyd Williams '36, did not sit on the bench this time, and as if justice pre- vailed, it was Wilson that lost, 29–26. The next year, after Alito's father had graduat- ed, Williams was team captain. The two schools did not play each other again. Kevin Coyne last wrote "Written on the Bones," a Winter 2017 feature about anthropology professor Jared Beatrice and what his study of human bones found along the Arizona border indicates about the migrant experience. American dream Justice Alito holds his father's Italian birth certificate, which he keeps in his high court office. in the Pacific during World War II. He and Rose didn't start dating until after the war. "How they got together is a piece of information that may be forever lost," says Alito, who was born in Trenton in 1950. He has one younger sister, Rosemary, a prominent employment law attorney in New Jersey. "As women did then, my mother stopped teaching in the classroom when her own children became her full-time students," he says. His mother led them at home in science projects, his father combed word by word through compositions, and everybody was reading, always. "They believed in education," he says of his parents, both of whom also earned master's degrees. office until his retirement in 1985. The office had the added attraction of being near the dinosaurs that his son liked to visit in the New Jersey State Museum. "He loved that job," says Alito, whose father developed a particular expertise in apportioning legislative districts. "I can still hear him in the kitchen punching numbers into an adding machine." IN RESPONSE TO JUSTICE ALITO'S recent query, TCNJ staffers unearthed documents that added telling details about his parents' life in college. Both had admirable academic records — his father was elected to Kappa Delta Pi, the national honor society in education — but neither was especially good in music.

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