On a quiet suburban street in the little town of Riverside, R.I., there sits a charming white house. The appropriate seasonal flowers remain erect in their flower boxes which sit under the windows, all adorned with blue shutters. There is a bird feeder suction-cupped to one of the windows, which faces the west side of the house; the side that overlooks the bay. A happy couple in their seventies sit in their favorite places in the living room. Barbara, or “B,” as her husband calls her, rests on the couch, while Stan takes his favorite place on the recliner. They watch the birds fly back and forth from the bird feeder on the window pane. Stan has his bird identification book spread out on his lap. He transfers his glasses from the top of his head to rest on the bridge of his nose. His brow furrows and his finger follows the lines of the page until he finds his answer.

“Chickadee!” He declares. “That one was a chickadee that just came up.”

“It was a pretty one,” says B. The pair contentedly watch the birds.

Since he has retired from his job as a school Principal, Stan enjoys his life in which days pass at a lackadaisical pace, but nevertheless, one that is habitual and fulfilling. He likes it this way, Stan does. He loves waking up before the sun does, grabbing the morning’s paper, and making his way to the nearby Dunkin Donuts to drink his morning coffee- hot, one cream, one sugar,- and completing his daily crossword puzzle.

He loves ending his day, at the wooden table in the front room under the warm, orange light of the lamp and the company of his glasses, configuring a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle with his wife, and a bottle of red.

He goes about his life with a smile on his face and a liveliness in his gait. He is well known and deeply appreciated in town; a man who has worked hard to rise up from a background that didn’t consist of much, to the prosperous and gentle-mannered man that he is today. Stan had pulled himself up by his bootstraps. Although there are many factors that contributed to his growth into a man that defied his roots which could have confined him, the dominant hero in the story of Stan Traverse is his wife, B. For his life would change forever when he would move to East Providence and meet her in their 6th-grade class. Her presence and participation in his life would guide him towards a brighter future, right up until the lazy days in the quaint little house on Carousel Dr. where they would watch the birds, work on their jigsaw puzzles, and drink their wine together.

His everyday routine wasn’t always so serene. Stan describes his life as child: “We lived from week to week,” he explained. His mother worked in a laundromat in West Warwick, while his father labored in a dairy plant. “Their main concern was earning a living. There was no such thing as reading to your kids at night. They came home from their day’s work and it was not about kids. It was not a nurturing situation. There was never really any warmth involved.”

It wasn’t until his family moved to East Providence, when Stan was in the 6th grade, that he experienced the warmth and comfortability that most would associate with the family unit. “If I had stayed in West Warwick, I would have been a millrat, I wouldn’t have gone to college. But coming to EP and going to Sacred Heart, making the friends that I had made, they influenced a ton of my future.” He found this support and compassion in his future wife’s family. “Her parents showed interest in me more than my own parents did in some instances,” says Stan.

Once at East Providence High School, Stan was known as the little spitfire of a point guard and basketball star. “The Journal Bulletin loved him,” says B. “He was in there all the time in high school.”

B has kept a yellow folder of newspaper clippings which featured Stan throughout his career as a basketball player. The folder is not a thin one. An article written in 1962 titled, “Rogers’ Hope For State Title Shattered by Townies” praised Traverse’s talents. “The smooth passing, quick moving Townies, paced by little Stan Traverse, a diligent floor man… Traverse, a whiz at intercepting passes, drove through with 1:11 left to give East Providence a 49-43 lead...but the Townies’ sparkplug was Traverse, a sure ball-handler and a streak driving-through” are just some of the excerpts that can be read from the journal.

Sports were a huge part of Stan’s life growing up. “It was the only thing I really cared about in high school.” While B’s father had often brought Stan to practice or games when he didn’t have a ride, Stan’s parents “had never gone to a game. In fact, they would constantly remind me, ‘Why are you playing sports, you should be working, you should be bringing money into this house.’ There was always that guilty feeling that I was not pulling my weight, I was playing sports.” He shrugs and looks down. “It was the thing that kept me interested in high school.”

Stan’s love for sports and physical activity would further affect his style as a teacher, father, and even a grandfather. Stan coached his kids, Rob and Sue, in all the sports teams they participated in growing up; a profound contrast from Stan’s parents’ participation in his basketball career. And when he didn’t coach, “He came to as many, if not all of my softball games to watch, and that always meant so much,” says Sue. “Maybe not when he stood behind the backstop and would yell in disapproval of the umpire’s call,” she laughs. “Even in the neighborhood. There was always a whiffle ball game, or a pop-up contest going on with my friends. No matter what, wherever there were kids, he was around.”

Corrie, his grandchild, expresses how often her “Grandstan” would make up games to play with his grandchildren and their friends. “Whenever my sister and I had friends over in the summer, he would hop right out of his chair by the pool, and say ‘let’s play a game. How about this. I’ll throw the ball up, and you have to try to catch it while jumping in the pool at the same time.’ All of my friends loved him. They even called him ‘Grandstan’ as if he was their own grandfather.”

Corrie lets loose a giggle as she recalls a memory. “You would never assume that he came from such a family where warmth and compassion were so removed. He has always been such a softy in my eyes, in his own way I guess. When I was little, he would sit so still on the couch and let me give him a makeover. I mean I would draw a thick line of red lipstick straight across his forehead and he would just laugh and let me keep making my masterpiece.”

Stan had found his own way to show the warmth he was not shown when he was younger, and it was B who had taught and led him to be the gentle-mannered and fun-loving grandfather that Corrie knows him as today.

Stan reflects on the style in which he raised his own children. “I think Rob and Sue were both raised in the same manner and environment in which B had grown up in. It was more difficult for me to show that kind of warmth because I was not raised in that fashion. So it took a bigger effort for me to embrace those kinds of things. B was the epicenter, she would set the tone for me to follow. She created the environment and it helped me address and be closer to my kids than I was used to.”

B had even played a hand in Stan’s decision to go to college. Once it had come time to take the SAT’s in his senior year of high school, “she wrote out, paid for, and completed the application for my SAT exam, because A, I didn’t have the money, B, I didn’t have the interest, and C, I didn’t know how I was going to go to college; I didn’t have any money to go.”

Stan and B would both go on to get degrees in Elementary education from Rhode Island College. At the time, Stan did not know what a blessing his job would be to him, or how skilled he would be at it. At just 31 years old, he was asked to become principal of the school he was teaching in.

Stan chuckles as he reminisces about his experiences as a principal in an elementary school. He leans in, puts both elbows on the table, and takes a breath. He is going to tell me a story. His voice suddenly gets very low as if he is revealing insider information, and only I can know. His face, very animated and intense. “This wasn’t so funny... this hurt,” he warns me that this is a time he can laugh about now, but I learn that it was a serious matter in the past. “A teacher once sent a kid down [to tell me], ‘so-and-so is acting up, and I have no control over him’. So I climb the stairs”, Stan pumps his arms as he reenacts the story for me, “I go in this door, I bend down, and I say to the kid, ‘you got two choices here’” Stan’s voice becomes low and raspy with warning. He continues, “I said, ‘One, take my hand and you walk out of here, and the kids won’t know what’s going on, or two,’” he pokes his finger at me as if I am the kid he was threatening all those years ago, “‘if you don’t do that, I’m gonna pick you up and carry you out of here.’” Stan pauses for dramatic effect, “The kid just looks at me and goes, ‘NUMBER TWO’.” Stan throws his head back and laughs. Once he composes himself, he resumes. “So I pick him up, and all the kids are looking at me like,” Stan widens his eyes in imitation of all his students. “And while I’m holding him, he bites me right in the chest!” As I watched Stan tell this story, I realize what it must have been like to be a student sitting at a desk in his classroom. His face contorts with every new event to cue the emotions that his audience is supposed to feel. He is animated and captivating. You hang on to his every word.

He was loved and admired as the Principal who always went the extra mile. He played kickball with the kids during recess, held contests during lunch, and even held floor hockey games with his students after school for twenty years. “What Principal stays after school with the students to play floor hockey with them?” says Stan’s son Rob, emphasizing that his Dad’s participation and involvement in his students’ lives is what set him apart from the rest.

“There were a lot of above and beyond things he did,” says B. “Sometimes we didn’t see him for dinner, but his students did.” She smiles and looks proudly at her husband. He looks down modestly, and nods.

An article in the East Providence Post, which dates back to Stan’s days as principal of two schools in EP, describes “Reading Week” and the daily events that occurred at the school to celebrate the educational pastime. “Well it was Friday, character day, and Mr. Traverse was dressed as Oliver Twist, but I couldn’t help thinking he should have dressed as Superman as he ran to his car, leaped in, and flew towards Tristam… I just want to say that there are not many people who could handle this situation as well as Mr. Traverse does,” writes Ginny Nunes, former President of the Agnes B. Hennessey PTA.

Stan is a walking example of a character that wanted to learn and grow. He knows that a child will become a product of their environment. With this in mind, he is an advocate for a teaching style that is healthy, stimulating, and fun. “When you see a teacher that doesn’t really get into it, you just say, ‘You don’t know what you’re missing,’ because kids want to be motivated and they get so excited when you’ve got a teacher that is exuberant and interested in them.”

Stan’s prosperity with the youth in his community was evident when he retired from his position as principal in the school system. “When he left Myron Francis School, they had a dinner at the high school. Every person in that school, I mean, there were between 500 and 600 people at that dinner, and they did things for a week long period. They had pictures of him all around the school, from when he was a little kid, [to] when he was older… he also went into the east Providence Hall of Fame,” says B. Stan humbly assures me that his nomination into the EP hall of fame was just a matter of “expediency.”

I watch Stan, as he smiles. The crows feet around his eyes wrinkle up; evidence of the great amount of laughter and grins that have populated his lifetime. His presence in the room is palpable, like that of a silent leader. The type of man you would do anything for; not because you are afraid of him, but because you would never want to disappoint him. It’s difficult to believe that the mellow and nurturing character is one he had to work hard to achieve. He has always somehow found a way to show his feelings to his loved ones, despite the fact that he was rarely exposed to an affectionate and lovey-dovey climate in his own childhood. I am left wondering how he turned out to be so capable with kids, for who was so capable with him? It takes a certain type of man to take what little foundation they had, and use influences from outside environments (in Stan’s case, it was B, and the potential for a family that he’d never had), and build himself into the strong, loving and adored man he is today.