PEORIA, Ill. — With just a bit of pomp but enough circumstance to fill several volumes, Richard Basso and Bill Hyde finally got their Spalding Institute diplomas on Feb. 5.
Perhaps they didn’t throw their graduation caps quite as high as they might have 58 years ago, but the tosses were heartfelt just the same.
“They even backdated everything,” said Hyde, laughing as he examined his new piece of parchment dated 1952. “I’ve been waiting 60 years for this.”
Basso and Hyde left Spalding as sophomores in 1950 to serve their country in Korea.
Basso joined the Marines, returning after the conflict to pick up his life in Peoria with a family and a business, Midstate Terrazzo and Tile. He’s buried two wives and suffered a stroke six months ago.
“His parents were both immigrants from Italy, so I think he felt more of a call to serve his country, to be an American,” said his daughter, Val Coletta of Dunlap.
He never returned to school. His lack of a diploma has been “almost a badge of honor,” since he chose country over education, she said. But he had tears in his eyes as he gripped his diploma.
“This means everything to him,” Coletta said.
Hyde, now of Lincoln, joined the Navy, serving as a crew chief on a search and rescue helicopter. Though he did receive some education through the Navy, it wasn’t a Spalding diploma.
Life may have gone on, but their classmates never forgot. One of them, Peorian Bud Murphy, brought the men up at a lunch with a few classmates at the Lariat Steakhouse about six months ago.
He’d heard state law now enables high schools to confer diplomas on people who left school to serve in Korea.
Jim Flynn and Gene Schierer loved the idea, and the men approached Peoria Notre Dame High School Principal Charlie Roy and asked him to look into it. Spalding merged with Academy of Our Lady to become Peoria Notre Dame.
Flynn’s wife, Trisha, dug out his diploma, and Roy took it to the graphic arts teacher, who went to work. The finished product was sent to a printer, and shortly after, the school had two authentic 1952 diplomas to award.
A date was set, and classmates began calling one another to spread the word. A few dozen, most now 77 years old, showed up to watch the small ceremony, held in front of the entire Notre Dame population after a Catholic Schools Week Mass.
“This sure is nice,” Schierer said. “It really came out good.”
All of the planning went on without the would-be graduates’ knowledge.
“They sprung it on me about two or three days ago,” Basso said. “I couldn’t believe it. I was shocked. The people in my class are nice people.”
Among the classmates in attendance was Eileen Ayers, who remembers missing Basso most at dances for Spalding and Academy of Our Lady.
“Dick was everybody’s hope to get asked to dance,” she said. “He was a heck of a dancer.”
Watching him and Hyde finally accept their diplomas and officially take their place among the class of 1952 was truly special, she said.
“This was just wonderful,” she said.
“It’s been a long time coming,” said Ed Dugard of Peoria, who remembers meeting Basso on the playground at St. Bernard’s School in eighth grade. “A long time.”
The only mishap in the planning was Murphy’s – he was in Florida the day the ceremony happened. But he called minutes after the ceremony had ended to congratulate the new graduates by cell phone.
Hyde already has decided to take the step many recent high school graduates take – college. He doesn’t even need the G.I. Bill to do it.
“Senior citizens in Lincoln go to Heartland Community College for free,” he said. “I want to do physics and math and whatever else goes with it.”
Read the original article from WBBM News Radio.
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