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By Root 1264 0

boy’s teeth, still attached to his mouth, sank into the headboard and stuck. His frantic babysitter called the police. The police called the closest dentist, who, as luck would have it, was the boy’s father. I explained, too, how, in a world before computers and cell phones, which all of the students in the classroom had, we printed our one-page newspaper on something called a mimeograph machine and sold it on store counters for a nickel. The Miami Herald picked up my story and boxed it on its front page along with an article about The Item, our newspaper. The students were pleased with my tale, but, a bit unsettling for me, they wanted to know just who Zorro was and what a mimeograph machine and the Miami Herald were.

At recess, Nancy marched her class double-file to the playground. Some of the children went off to play kickball on the grass while Nancy watched the children who began climbing the jungle gym, hanging from rings, and playing on the swing set. Even though it was time for them to run freely, several children, some from other classes, gravitated to Nancy and seemed compelled to touch base with her regularly. A few children began to talk giddily to me about “Mrs. G.” Shenaya, a heavyset girl, bubbled, “I like Mrs. G because she’s funny and because she tells great stories and because she’s nice.” Then she ran off to swing from the rings. When she leaped for them, she fell onto the black rubber mat and began to cry.

Nancy carefully comforted her. She did so with the practice of a woman who has been drying tears for five decades, and instinctively knows the difference between physical injury and humiliation. But she showed no sign of doubting the girl’s complaint. She hugged Shenaya and soothed her with maternal intelligence. Then she called over two other girls and asked them to escort their classmate to the nurse. Sniffling, the girl hobbled off. “They don’t want you to touch the children anymore, these days, but sometimes you just have to,” Nancy said.

Since she was hired to teach full-time four years ago, Nancy Gagliano has not only won the affection of her students, she has won the admiration of the administration, fellow faculty members, and parents. Elisha Carr’s son, Nathan, entered Nancy’s class in 2006. He was undersized, fearful, and withdrawn, the result, his mother said, of a bad experience in first grade. But it was forgotten and his behavior changed in Nancy’s class.

“She brought my son out of his shell. By the end of the year, he was a different child. She’s very loving, caring, and nurturing. Not every teacher provides that. Her teaching style made him comfortable. It’s true, she does expect a lot, but when her students go into third grade, it’s easier for them to make the transition. Nathan has been on the honor roll every semester since he had Nancy in second grade. She’s an amazing teacher,” Carr said. In fact, she was so impressed by Nancy that, at thirty-one, she adopted her as a mentor and returned to college to become a teacher, too.

Until she moved to Florida in 1998, Nancy Gagliano lived her entire life in Chicago and, once married, in Hegewisch, a small, tightly knit neighborhood on Chicago’s far South Side, founded in 1883 by industrialist Achilles Hegewisch. Hegewisch became a working-class enclave for Polish-Americans and the families of Chicago’s police, firefighters, teachers, and steelworkers, a distinction it retains.

Nancy Andjelic and Jim Gagliano grew up a couple of blocks apart, just west of Calumet Park and Lake Michigan. They met one summer when they were fourteen and sixteen, respectively. She had gone on an outing to Wicker Park pool with a teen group from St. George’s Catholic Church. “I was standing with my friend Sandy and I see this handsome dago, with this beautiful build, climb up to the board. More often than not, kids would turn around and go back down the ladder, or just jump, it was so high. But this guy does a perfect swan dive into the pool. After that, he climbs out of the pool and goes back up the ladder and does a perfect jackknife. So I asked Sandy,