Pull into the ACPHS front parking lot on a Tuesday morning, and Joe Early would greet you.
If it was first thing, he’d have his newspaper, an egg sandwich and coffee from Stewart’s. If you were a prospective student, he’d step out of the booth, talk to you and your family, make sure you knew where you were headed. And if you knew him, well, he’d chat some. He’d remember your last conversation about the family, what was troubling you, what you were looking forward to. Maybe he’d share some gossip. You might start having such a good time that you’d be late for class.
“I’d have to tell my rotation students, ‘I’m going to be a little late on Tuesday,’” said Pharmacy Practice Instructor Andrew Flynn ’87, who became friends with Joe because his parking spot was the one closest to the booth.
Joe’s absence has been felt painfully this semester by all who knew him, as illness kept him from returning to his part-time job after 16 years at ACPHS. That hurt has been more acute in the last several weeks, since Joe’s passing on Oct. 13.
He was 83, but by all accounts, you’d never know it.
“He was 83, he looked 50 and he acted 35,” said friend Tom Venter, a retired attorney who works in the ACPHS mailroom. “Oh god, I’m gonna miss him.”
Before coming to ACPHS, Joe worked at Schaeffer Brewing Company and for Niagara Mohawk, the precursor to National Grid, retiring in 2005. In 2007, former ACPHS Vice President of Operations Packy McGraw hired Joe along with a half dozen other retirees for part-time jobs as fitness center attendants, checking students in to the gym and straightening up after them. For Joe, the job was initially a way to keep busy after the loss of his wife Nancy in 2006, said his son, Brian Early. It was also a homecoming. Like McGraw, Joe had gone to school at the Christian Brothers Academy, then housed in the building that is now the ACPHS library. The gym he was working in was where he played sports as a student himself.
He did more than keep busy, McGraw said. An athlete himself, he chatted about sports and attended games, cheering on the Panthers in basketball, soccer and other pursuits. He was part of the campus community.
“The pharmacy school became his home away from home,” Brian Early said.
The retirees who worked as fitness center attendants also became strong social supports to each other, said Venter. They joked around while they worked at jobs that were free of the stress of their former careers, they met out for dinner regularly, they supported each other through life.
When the COVID pandemic hit and the gym closed, they were deployed to different assignments – Venter went to the mailroom, for instance, and Joe to the parking lot.
Ask what Joe was like and you’ll hear nearly the same thing from everyone: “He’d do anything for anybody. Anything you needed. If he could do it, he’d do it.” McGraw recalled, for instance, that some years ago there were issues with water buildup in the gym after harsh rains. If it rained on Joe’s day off, he’d call McGraw to see if he needed help.
“Joe was a Hall of Fame athlete at CBA, but more importantly, he was a Hall of Fame person!” McGraw said.
Outside of ACPHS, Joe volunteered with the St. John’s/St. Anne’s Outreach Center, delivering food to people, among other things. Venter recounted a tale told at Joe’s funeral service about a non-verbal woman who always looked forward to Joe’s delivery and the promise of chocolate milk. There wasn’t always chocolate milk in the bags that Joe would deliver, so he made sure to stop and get some himself, on his way to her.
“All he wanted to do was be remembered as a good and decent man,” Venter said. “And that’s what he was, in every sense.”