LYNN — Half a century ago, Albert G. Malagrifa took his son on a Sunday drive to see a pile of dirt on Neptune Boulevard. He declared he would be the principal of a school slated to be built there and, for more than a decade, he was.
“He took me for a ride in his beat-up Pontiac and told me we were going to a place called the brickyard,” said son Steve Malagrifa, 63. “We drove there and he goes, ‘you see that school right there?’ I told him there was no school, it was just a big pile of dirt. He looked at me and said ‘well, I’m going to be the principal of that school someday.'”
Now, the city is recognizing the countless hours of work and dedication Malagrifa, a longtime Lynn resident, has given the school. On Sept. 12, the Lynn School Committee voted to rename the Lynn Tech Annex building to the Albert G. Malagrifa building, in honor of “Mr. Lynn Tech” himself.
Malagrifa, 86, said Bart Conlon, his friend and former Lynn Tech coworker of 27 years, called him up that Thursday night and told him they needed to talk in private.
“One car pulled up, two cars pulled up, and then a third car pulled up and all of a sudden there were nine people who showed up and took over my house,” Malagrifa said. “They came in and my wife was panicking, asking me what was going on and I said with a laugh ‘maybe the cops are coming to arrest me.’ They put the TV on and I still didn’t know what was happening until the School Committee meeting came on. That’s when everybody hushed up.”
Everyone in the house was so loud he couldn’t hear what was happening on the TV, Malagrifa said, but everyone jumped up and screamed when the final vote came in and the name change was official. Wanting to experience the moment all over again, he said he called and had them send over three DVDs of the meeting.
“I didn’t believe it,” he said. “How do you believe something like that?”
While it was all a dream come true, Malagrifa said he didn’t always envision a life of teaching for himself. He grew up in East Boston, the youngest of eight siblings and the son of Italian immigrants, and lived on welfare after losing his father at the age of 4. His mother raised him and his siblings all on her own in a “tent of a house,” he said.
He graduated eighth grade from a parochial school and had a hopeful pathway to attend Boston College High School, but his mother couldn’t afford it, he said. After a few trial and errors at other high schools, Malagrifa ended up at Charlestown High School, where he joined the electrical program.
He was the top male student in his class, captain of his basketball team and co-captain of his football team. From ninth grade to 12th grade, his biggest mentor was his basketball coach, Frank Powers, he said. If it wasn’t for Powers, Malagrifa said he never would have joined the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 103, which he has been a member of for 66 years.
“I had no intentions of being a teacher,” Malagrifa said. “In fact, my only intention at the time was to be the best electrician I could be. I love being an electrician to this day.”
He was on the union job for about eight years before he was approached to take the teacher training program, he said. He signed up for college extension courses and said he ended up loving the atmosphere. For months, he’d go to work at 6 a.m. to do electrical work and then go straight to his classes.
In September 1965, Malagrifa was hired as the new electrical teacher at the Lynn Trade School, when there were only 19 faculty members and 180 students, he said.
“When I started at the old Lynn Trade, I had been married for five years,” he said. “I decided to leave working in the electrical field because my wife had two children. I was leaving at 6 a.m. and not coming back home until after 6 p.m., and it was just too much.”
Four years later, more and more students began to outgrow the old trade school, he said. When design and architectural plans started to fall into place for the new Lynn Vocational Technical High School at 80 Neptune Blvd., Malagrifa became one of the consultants. He spent his summers off working as the electrical foreman for the building project until the school opened its doors in 1971.
“That was my union and my people working on that project,” he said. “I’d say they got a pretty good building out of it.”
Malagrifa, or “Mr. Mal,” as his students remember him, was the school’s electrical teacher until 1976, which is when he got promoted to Lynn Tech’s first vocational guidance counselor and job placement person. He was the vice principal from 1983 to 1986, until his promotion to principal which he held until his retirement in 1999.
In those years, Malagrifa helped put together the city’s first teachers’ union and the school’s alumni program. He was the school’s first assistant basketball coach and he found a way to bulldoze the high school’s “infamous black wall,” which was riddled with marijuana joints, needles and alcohol nips, he said.
With Conlon by his side as vice principal, Malagrifa was also the consultant for the Lynn Tech annex building project. The building, which was formerly the West Lynn Creamery, opened in 2000.
“Mr. Conlon was my right hand man, without him I would’ve just been a piece of bologna,” Malagrifa said. “When I retired, I figured the new building was done and I knew it was going to be in good hands because I had a feeling Bart was getting my old job … The Annex building is like my baby. I could tell you where anything is in that building right now.”
Conlon said he watched Malagrifa’s dream of building that “school mall” come true. Malagrifa doesn’t sport his “LVTI” license plate for himself, Conlon said, he does so as a reminder of the hundreds and hundreds of kids he has helped over the years.
“Over the last three Hall of Fames we’ve probably inducted about 45 people and I will bet that 43 of them mentioned this guy right here,” Conlon said, pointing to Malagrifa. “At the last Hall of Fame, I was sitting next to him and he kept asking why everyone kept saying his name and why almost every single person thanked him. He got them all of their first jobs and he knows where they all work to this day, and he just has a great memory for knowing students’ names and what they’ve done since Lynn Tech. He’s a Lynn Tech legend.”
