He was my first real coach. It was December 1957, the early years of rock ‘n’ roll on the radio, the New England Patriots off in the distance somewhere, and Frank Murgo was the coach of the Peck Junior High School basketball team, a team I was trying out for.

He was a gym teacher at Peck then, but his real claim to fame, for us anyways, was that we saw him as a real coach, one of those mythic creatures who no doubt had walked off the pages of adolescent fiction and up the three flights of stairs into this old gym. Rest assured Frank Murgo — who died last week at age 95 — was the boss.