Usually, when I see a person’s name on a building, I think one thing: “Wow, that guy was rich enough to buy a building.” In Great Neck, a town with people so rich it inspired our nation’s quintessential novel about wealth, it would seem natural that a man like William A. Shine, the namesake of my high school, was just another Jay Gatsby. Or, at least, that’s what I thought until this week.
It began with a simple question. My friend looked out the school bus window to see the bold letters affixed to our school’s entrance: “William A. Shine Great Neck South High School,” and asked me, “What does the A. stand for?” Perhaps a normal person would give up after a fruitless Google, but not us. A bus ride’s worth of obsessive research and discussion left us with nothing but a drive for the truth.
While the internet didn’t tell me his middle name, I started to learn a lot about Dr. Shine. First of all, he was a former superintendent of the school district, not some rich donor or United States president. He died three years ago at the ripe age of 93. He received his doctorate in education from Rutgers University. He was the only person in the district to have a school named after him while still alive. His friends called him Bill. Tantalizingly, every google search told me more about this man’s life: his achievements, his ambitions, his aspirations. Everything but that elusive A.
I came to school the next day ready to look for answers. The words “William A. Shine” hovered above my head, taunting me as I walked up the stairs to enter my school—his namesake. Someone in here must know, right?
I headed with my team of private investigators to the school library. We were going to learn the truth, whatever it took. There, we were reminded of something about Dr. Shine: he isn’t some mythological figure from the days of yore—he worked in the district so recently that some of his former colleagues still work at South High. Ms. White directed us to Dr. Robinson, a close friend of Dr. Shine’s. Although she didn’t know his middle name, this dead end opened up many new paths.
We asked every teacher we could find who had ties to Dr. Shine. Mr. Graham and Mr. Mooney both led us to Ms. Callaghan, who called the superintendent, Dr. Bossert. While we waited for the people at Phipps to do some digging, we sought Ms. Tria. With every teacher we asked, I noticed a pattern in their reactions to our questioning. Of course, they were amused by our insistence on learning Dr. Shine’s middle name, but after the initial laughter faded, the teachers still had soft, melancholy smiles on their faces. I could see how much they cared about the man behind the big letters on the side of our school.
The final stop on our wild goose chase, Ms. Tria, led us back to the library where we started, this time to dig deeper into any documents we could find. We looked for birth certificates, death certificates, newspaper articles—even gravestone locations. After a lot of searching, our efforts began to look grim. We were ready to throw in the towel and declare the middle name of William A. Shine lost to history—to let it be uttered for the last time, let it die its second death.
Aloysius (pronounced al-oh-ish-us) is the Latinized form of the name Alois, the Occitan form of the French name Louis. Its meaning roughly translates to “famous warrior.” It also was the name printed between “William” and “Shine” on a 1982 Southerner article about new hires in the Great Neck school district, right below “Vital Statistics” and above “Age: 54.” My research team and I rejoiced. What had turned out to be a three-day search had come to a close with a satisfying answer.
I learned two things from my investigation. The first is that William A. Shine’s middle name is Aloysius. The second is that Dr. Shine lives up to his middle name. It’s hard to go far in Great Neck South without meeting someone touched by his work. He believed in education more than anything. I’m proud to go to a school named after a man who fought for education, particularly now when public education is under attack in America. Now, when I see the bold letters on the side of my high school, I don’t see the name of some heartless businessman or faceless higher-up who did office work at the Phipps building up the street. I see the name of Dr. William Aloysius Shine, famous warrior for education.
