Drewery Jr.: An Educator, Athlete and Now a Poet

Gordon Drewery Jr. has loved football all his life. Heck, his father was playing on an Army GI team while his mother, Nora, lay in a Stuttgart hospital giving birth to him.

And that is another story, because Drewery also loves to write.

His first book, "More Abundantly," a 160-page tome of his own poetry was the subject of a book signing Saturday in the Chase Room at the .

Although his ode to football and, in particular, Madison football, is not in the book published through Xlibris, it was the one he chose to read to the wellwishers from Madison and Morristown, two places where he has bonds and memories.

“Football was my fate from birth and would be the greatest achievement in life to fight as a Dodger…..to run the fields under Crazy Pete Mazzocchi, Lou Romano, Tony Ariano…to join the greatest brotherhood known to man FOOTBALL in Madison,” writes Drewery, who is a football coach at Morristown High School.

“To glide behind McSherry, Smitty and Kakalic, to accept pitches from Nealie OD, to receive blocks from Van Schuyver, Mattie, Irving and more bleeding maroon and gold to my soul.

“Little did I know that the game of football would mean the world.”

Drewery, an English and special education teacher at Morristown High School, is a 1985 graduate of . He has relatives in both towns, played basketball at the Neighborhood House off Speedwell Avenue and remembers being welcome at the where kids who couldn’t pay were allowed to come in anyway.

Drewery, who played the game for SUNY Albany, started writing at , inspired by his sixth-grade teacher, Helene Shalotsky, now retired and living in West Orange.

“He was wonderful,” she recalled. “He was a doll,” she said of her student who had a penchant for using lowercase, something she eventually approved of for poetry, but not other forms of writing, which he also pursues today.

Drewery’s mother, Nora, put the signing together and read two of her favorite poems “Mind Alone,” a plea for black men to cherish the black woman for her mind and “Mother and Child,” a read on a mother’s obligation to her child.

He has been influenced by e.e. cummings, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou, among others. He is partial to Shakespeare, but says when he was younger, he “hated Shakespeare because he killed the black guy.”

“I never thought of writing for any fame or fortune. I just write for the heart,” Drewery said.

For a copy of "More Abundantly," call 973-822-3684. Cost is $15.