When Joseph Crowley looks at the clock he received as a gift yesterday afternoon, it will be easy for him to remember what he has spent many hours over 30-plus years on.
Instead of numerals, the hours are marked by names of city schools: the Altavesta at one o’clock, followed by the Linscott, Joyce, Hurld, Goodyear, Reeves, Clapp, White, Kennedy, Wyman, Shamrock and, at high noon, Woburn Memorial High School.
Crowley has sat on the Woburn School Committee for 38 years.
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A group of about 30 people, including two past school superintendents, a state representative, a representative of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees and members of the School Committee, school administrators and others gathered around 3 p.m. yesterday to wish Crowley well in retirement.
The former high school math teacher was first elected to the School Committee, Crowley told Woburn Patch, in 1969. Crowley taught in Winchester for most of his career.
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He served for six years on the Woburn School Committee, then took a “time out” in 1977. Meetings got long and contentious, he explained.
Four years later, in 1981, with young children of his own and a new limit on local municipal funding—Proposition 2 ½—Crowley ran for a committee seat—and has held it since.
School Committee member Denis Russell, who told the audience he served on the committee with Crowley for 20 years, thanked him for his friendship and his guidance—the way Crowley “settled us down.”
Russell also took listeners down memory lane. He recalled the difficulty of dealing with level-funded school budgets and physical issues at different schools, like a flood at the Kennedy Middle School and a problem with a boiler at the old high school. Things always broke or flooded, Russell said, in the middle of the night.
Like Russell, former Woburn School Supt. Dr. Carl Batchelder also praised Crowley for his way of “settling everybody down” and the guidance Crowley provided to him.
The school superintendent before Dr. Batchelder, Paul Andrews, also attended the gathering.
So did Glenn Koocher, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees. The association and the School Committee recognized Crowley for his 38 years of commitment and dedication, Koocher said.
State Rep. James Dwyer pointed to the work Crowley has done in the city beyond the School Committee. Crowley was one of the founders of Woburn Youth Hockey, Dwyer told Woburn Patch.
”I always looked up to Joe,” Dwyer said.
Crowley thanked “the people of Woburn” for seating him on the committee. He was first elected, he quipped, when he was 11 years old.
He said he doesn’t plan to stay away from the committee meeting room on meeting nights. He plans to attend meetings, he said, sit in the audience and offer citizen participation – “to yell.”
Outside the committee, Crowley works as an appraiser. He sold his real estate business five years ago, he said; now he said he works for the person who bought the business.
He has five grandchildren, he said, and another year as president of the Woburn Historical Society.
“I’ve got plenty to do,” Crowley concluded.
