Former Faculty Author

Spotlight on Phil Gambone

Phil Gambone, who taught English, Latin, and social studies at Park for 27 years, is excited to share his most recent book, As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in WWII, with the Park community. In January, Director of Communications Kate LaPine sat down with Phil over Zoom to learn more about the book, his writing process, and what’s next on the horizon.

Congratulations on your latest book! How long have you been writing?

I wrote a lot of poetry in college. In fact, I had the great good fortune to study with fabulous poets Robert Lowell and Robert Fitzgerald, who did a translation of the Odyssey and the Iliad. When I came back to Cambridge to do graduate work, I was also doing some writing, journalism, and short stories. So, writing is something that I’ve been doing since the late 60s. My “catalog” now includes many genres: novels and short stories, personal essays, non-fiction, scholarly essays, as well as book reviews and interviews.

In As Far As I can Tell, you refer to your journals, too.

I still keep a journal! I write every day, it’s the first thing I do in the morning. I just make a cup of tea and I sit down and I write and kind of reflect on the day before. So sometimes that’s 15 minutes and sometimes that’s an hour. It’s kind of an exercise in meditation, or a way of focusing and centering, being present to what happened. I also meditate, but journaling is another kind of meditation. Yeah, I’ve been doing it since 1968. I think at last count, I have something like 125 volumes…

I’m curious about how the themes of this book tie into your long career as a teacher. You spent 27 years at Park, followed by 14 at Boston University Academy, working with adolescents—kids who are developing their own identity and grappling with who they are.

That’s a great question. You know, I was drawn to teaching for a lot of reasons. So we’ll start with the least exalted reason—I needed a job after college! When senior year came along, I had been moderately interested in teaching and a friend of mine had attended this school in Kansas City, so I interviewed with the headmistress and off I went.

Ultimately, I loved working with young people. I loved their enthusiasm. I loved their sense of discovery. I loved being able to open up young minds and get them excited about something. I loved literature and I wanted them to love literature. I loved writing and I wanted them to love writing. So I think for all of those reasons I went into teaching.

At Park, I guess I became known as somebody who was particularly responsive to kids who needed a helping hand in some way. For me, teaching was all about letting every child know that they could have success and that I was taking them seriously. Taking their interests seriously. Their questions seriously. Their problems seriously. That’s some of the things that I loved about teaching. It tapped into so many of my interests, not just literature, but also adolescent development.

You know, today we talk a lot about the whole child and social emotional learning, but I feel like Park has done that from the get go.

Park has done that from the get go. And one of the things that I ended up bringing to Boston University Academy was that sensitivity to the education of the whole child. When I first arrived in 2004, they were counting on intellectual magic happening just by putting brainy kids and PhD’s together. One of the things I learned at Park was that intellectual magic is only a portion of what an adolescent needs. There is real value to Howard Gardner’s seven kinds of intelligence and appreciating the education of the whole child, and I take some pride in helping BUA move in that direction.

As a teacher, how did you help kids discover themselves, understand their identities?

Interestingly, as a gay teacher at Park in the 80s and 90s, I did not feel at all that I had permission to be responsive to questioning students. I believe this has more to do with the time than anything the school said. However, when I got to BUA, it was a different era, it was a different constellation of students, a different demography—high school kids rather than middle school students—so I felt much more permission to be an out gay teacher there. From conversations with alumni, I think that Park is a very different place today. And I think that everyone is just much more open to looking at subjects and areas that were once considered inappropriate for middle school kids to explore.

One of the big themes in the book is secrets. Do you feel like secrets are inevitable? Or do you think that in a perfect world, everything is out on the table?

In the book, I talk about all of the things that my father withheld from telling us because I think he was traumatized by them and because he thought we would be. And then, of course, there’s everything that I withheld from my father, again because I thought maybe I wouldn’t get his approval or his love or his respect, not that in any way he was a tyrant or a bully or somebody who didn’t show enormous tolerance.

To say that secrets are inevitable maybe sounds a little too definitive, but I think there are always things that each of us is ashamed of or reticent to share or we feel that other people wouldn’t understand. One’s private life is very sacred and needs to be guarded, and you don’t just broadcast stuff that’s going on. You need to pick your moment and pick your audience for sharing.

A lot of people feel like I wrote this book because I felt guilty about not sharing more. But that really wasn’t the impetus. In part, it really was just to find out what my dad had gone through. And in part, yes, it was to question why I didn’t share more. But I don’t think I was wrestling with enormous trauma about the lack of communication between us. I think I felt like, OK, this is what happened and why did it happen and what did it mean?

I was wondering about what surprises you may have had in writing the book and what you may have discovered about yourself?

Certainly unlocking my father’s story was a huge surprise. But also, as I say in the book, when I began, I had been to Europe 20 times already. Researching and writing this book—seeking to uncover my father’s wartime experience—I found I was looking at Europe through very different eyes and I was looking at things that I had never looked at before: war cemeteries and rebuilt German towns and cities.

About As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in WWII

As a young gay man, Phil never told his father the reason why he was rejected from the draft during the Vietnam War. In turn, his father never talked about his participation in World War II. Father and son were enigmas to each other. Phil spent seven years uncovering who the man his quiet, taciturn father had been. He retraced his father’s entire journey across Europe, in addition to interviewing surviving veterans and conducting other extensive research. As Far as I Can Tell not only reconstructs what Phil’s father endured during the War, it also chronicles his own emotional odyssey as he followed his father’s route from Liverpool to the Elbe River. It became a journey that challenged Phil’s thinking about war, about European history, and about “civilization.” The book, which was voted one of the Best Books of 2020 by Boston.com, and was nominated for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award, is available through Rattling Good Yarns Press, Amazon, or your local independent bookstore.

And yes, of course, I learned a lot about myself, too. You know, one of the questions I keep asking throughout the book is “could I have mustered the same kind of courage and stamina that my father did had I gone to Vietnam?” And I never directly answer that question. I think it becomes a kind of leitmotif throughout the book in looking at my father and looking at my father’s behavior and looking at the ways that my father gritted his teeth and survived, I kept wondering, “could you have done the same had you been drafted?”