Education
School Spirit
Principal Leo Cancellare was the soul of El Paso’s Cathedral High. When he died in April at the age of 41, he passed into legend.
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“Leo fought so hard for the underdog because, at bottom, that’s how he viewed himself,” said his wife, Vera, a dark-haired, plainspoken woman who was Leo’s high school sweetheart at Irvin High School in El Paso and was married to him for nineteen years. Since Leo died, Vera has heard from the 79 high school all-American swimmers he trained at Cathedral, three members of an amateur swim club whom he coached who later competed in the Olympics, and thousands of the students he helped send to college, many on full scholarships. The living room in the brick house that she shared with Leo and their three children—fifteen-year-old Sarah, thirteen-year-old Vito, and eleven-year-old Emily—is filled with stacks of mail stuffed in brown grocery bags. “All these letters say almost the same thing,” said Vera, grabbing a handful of them. “The boys told him, ‘Thank you for believing in me, for not giving up on me, for making me work so damn hard, and for making me who I am.’ That was Leo’s gift.”
Leo’s father, Anthony Cancellare, grew up in a poor family in an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. He started delivering groceries when he was six years old, and later he shined shoes on Wall Street. Anthony Cancellare’s way out of poverty was to join the Army. Eventually he worked his way up to lieutenant colonel. Leo, the eleventh of twelve children, was born in 1957 in Richland, Washington. The family moved to El Paso when he was four months old.
One night when Leo was fifteen, his brother Willie, who was ten years older, went across the border to a party in Juárez, where he died of a heroin overdose. Vera believes that at some level Willie’s death was part of what drove Leo as an adult. “I can’t tell you the number of nights that Leo would go across the border himself to a bar called Fred’s and yank the Cathedral boys out of there and drive them home,” she said. “He didn’t want what happened to Willie to happen to anyone else.”
In high school Leo was only an average student; he made B’s and C’s and had to work hard for those grades. “He had vision and great courage,” said Vera, “but the truth is, schoolwork didn’t come easily to Leo. He made up for it by working harder than anyone else.” Later, in college, his hard work earned him a place on the dean’s list. As a teacher and principal, he would use this lesson from his own life to instruct the boys at Cathedral: He valued motivation more than intelligence.
Leo’s cancer was diagnosed on April 24, 1998. For months he had complained of pain in his chest, but he had no idea that the pain would turn out to be a large, deadly mass in his thymus gland, directly behind his heart. As it happened, one of Leo’s closest friends, Dr. Barry King, whose two sons had graduated from Cathedral, was in the hospital pathology lab when the diagnosis was made and saw the cancerous cells moving wildly across the slides under a microscope. “Right away, the bottom dropped out of my soul,” said King. “I knew Leo was doomed.”
Neither Leo nor Vera wanted to believe it. Five days later, after the diagnosis was confirmed, he had Vera drive him to Cathedral, where he called two school assemblies, one for juniors and seniors and a second for freshmen and sophomores. Recalled Joseph Moody, a senior who is the president of Cathedral’s student council: “Leo told us straight up that he had a rare form of cancer but for us not to worry. He told us to worry about Cathedral and said that was going to get rid of the cancer faster than shit through a goose.” At the time, Leo was still strong—at five feet nine inches, he weighed 219 pounds and was solid muscle—and Moody did not doubt for a minute that he would will himself well.
All through last summer and fall, as Leo traveled back and forth to Houston for treatment at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, he continued to try to work, but by Christmas he was too weak to go to school. He named Govea, a 1980 graduate of Cathedral, interim principal.
On February 9, when Cathedral’s basketball team faced El Paso’s Bellaire High School, which was the city’s top-ranked team, around one thousand people showed up for the game. At halftime Cathedral was down by 16 points when Leo, who had shrunk to 150 pounds, quietly entered the gymnasium using a cane to support himself. During a time-out in the third quarter, he walked slowly to the center of the court. He was too weak to lead a spoken cheer, so he led Cathedral in a silent one. The cheer, a series of hand signals, was one the Cathedral boys knew well. Leo performed the cheer once in a completely silent gym. The second time he lifted his hands, the boys yelled out the letters I-R-I-S-H in deafening unison. At the end of the cheer Leo simply lifted his left index finger high above his head—his signature gesture—indicating “number one,” bowed his head, and walked back to his seat. “I think we know what we have to do,” Govea, the basketball coach, tearfully told his team in the huddle. By the end of the game the score was Cathedral 72, Bellaire 66.
Leo made his last visit to the school the following month, when the Order of the Christian Brothers named him an honorary member. “I never did a single day’s work in my life,” he told the boys. “I did what I did here at Cathedral for love, and I love each one of you.” Brother Nick Gonzalez, who teaches religion, said the speech was Leo’s final lesson: Love your life.
He never gave up. According to Vera, he refused hospice care because he thought it would be an admission that he and the family had given up hope. On the morning of April 2, even though he could barely catch his breath, Leo refused to go to the hospital because he wanted to enjoy the view of the mountains outside his bedroom window. The last thing he told his wife and his children, who were with him all through the day, was “Stick together.”
The fact that Leo died on the afternoon of Good Friday, when Christians remember the crucifixion of Jesus, only hastened the inevitable: Leo the man was instantly transformed into Leo the legend. “He was like a savior to us,” Moody said. “Not Jesus or anything, just an extraordinarily good man.”
There was a big, formal funeral for Leo at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, but when school resumed after spring break, Brother Gonzalez led a private memorial service just for Cathedral’s student body. The members of the freshman class, who hardly knew Leo, already spoke of him as a guiding spirit. They told the story about the time Leo walked around the edge of the pool exploding firecrackers on the Fourth of July to light a fire under his swimmers, and the one about the time Leo took a piece of chewing gum out of a boy’s mouth and chewed it himself. Some students, like sophomore Tom Dean, remembered that it was Leo who arranged for a financial-aid grant to pay for their $4,200 annual tuition to Cathedral.
Great schools like Cathedral all have mythic figures like Leo Cancellare. They are the keys to the schools’ future—and they live on in death just as Cathedral’s student body chose to honor Leo during their memorial service for him: in silent cheers.
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