In 1975, Ruth Feinberg, then the assistant principal at Ansonia High School, placed a frantic phone call to Richard Nicolari, then the school district superintendent.
Feinberg had a full-scale riot on her hands at the school. Cops were outside. Teachers locked themselves in classrooms. Feinberg, who passed away in 2011, had just been hit in the head with a shoe.
Yet Nicolari was amazingly calm, which, in turn, calmed Feinberg.
“She couldn’t believe how calmly he was responding to the news,” said Lisa Nicolari, one of Nicolari’s daughters.
But that was her father — cool under pressure, no matter what.
Maybe it had something to do with the fact he raised four daughters — all of whom passed through the school district while he worked there.
“Raising four daughters in this school system while he was superintendent was enough to make him lose his hair,” she said, laughing.
Lisa Nicolari told the stories during a heart-felt tribute to her dad June 5 at Ansonia Middle School, as the school district officially named the school’s auditorium the “Dr. Richard F. Nicolari Auditorium” in her dad’s honor.
Lisa Nicolari is a teacher herself at the middle school, in addition to being a drama coach at the school.
Richard Nicolari passed away in 2011.
Mayor James Della Volpe said Ansonia was proud to call Nicolari one of its own. Judging from Nicolari’s accomplishments, it’s easy to see why.
Nicolari graduated from Ansonia High School in 1955 at age 16. He became a school principal in Ansonia just 10 years later.
He received his doctorate degree from the University of Connecticut in under a year, jamming in three years worth of course work.
He was named superintendent in 1974, at the age of 34.
He even wrote a speech for Gerald Ford, who stopped in Connecticut for a campaign speech during his 1976 presidential run. The Ford speech wasn’t known by his daughters until late in his life.
Nicolari didn’t enjoy the spot light, his daughter said. His wife, Judy, is another story, Lisa said.
Judy made it onto the front page of the newspaper the day after Ford’s speech, posing with the candidate and his wife, Betty. Richard Nicolari was nowhere to be seen.
“He kept so much to himself. Humility and patience were character strengths that best exemplified my father,” Lisa Nicolari said.
