In Memoriam

John Meehan is dead. Those words hit hard when I heard them. I knew John for 39 years.

We first met in 1970 when I returned to Springfield Gardens High School after a 4 year leave of absence serving with the United Federation of Teachers.

John and I hit it off immediately. He had been president of an AFSCME union and I had been president of the Teachers Representatives Union at the UFT. We were both very active in the UFT and shared the same values when it came to the rights of working men and women.

I was a department chairman when John came to me in 1973 and asked at what time I would be having lunch each day. He had started a union at Nassau Community College and wanted to spend lunch time together so that we could discuss the ins and outs of negotiating what would become the first adjunct faculty contract in the nation’s history. We spent countless hours together going over the provisions that would secure the rights and privileges an adjunct faculty would have to win if it were to gain the footing necessary to succeed.

I watched from afar as John negotiated that first contract. Much of what he negotiated has remained the bedrock of the contract to this day. Like John, I was teaching English at NCC when he asked me to represent the union on the Grievance Board. Thus began our long association fighting for the rights of the adjunct faculty. Our partnership was confirmed when I ran as John’s vice president. It was John and Charlie from then on.

John was more than a leader. John was the union’s inspiration. He inaugurated the VANGUARD and wrote the first column in “The Union’s Position.” He wrote like a lyric poet, especially when he wrote an obituary. I can still remember his obituary for Marvin Middlemark where John’s description of Marvin’s helicopter keeping pace over the cars in the funeral cortege was so beautifully written that one could envision the scene in color. That was typical John Meehan. He was a scholar, a teacher, a leader, and a friend.

He gave his heart and soul to the men and women of the Adjunct Faculty Association. He believed that the adjunct faculty here at NCC was the best anywhere—in or out of the country—and he made sure everyone knew it. In later years, he would write me to tell me how proud he was of us whenever he read of our accomplishments in the VANGUARD. He remained an avid reader of our house organ.

To say that he was our foundation is the truth. To say that he will be missed is certain. But it’s the words of Shakespeare’s Mark Antony that says it best:  “When comes such another?”              

                                                                                     Charles Loiacono