The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

by Jeff Hobbs

As group leader, Rob gave the keynote address. He’d rehearsed at home with his mother, and his deep voice didn’t falter as he spoke of this journey they were near to completing, the reliance they’d placed on one another along the way, the gift of manhood that the St. Benedict’s tradition had imparted to them. He was striking to all: muscular, focused, commanding. But what struck Charles Cawley was not Rob’s speech but Friar Leahy’s introduction. The headmaster spoke of a boy who woke up at four-thirty six days a week to lifeguard at the pool, who taught himself to swim as a freshman and now was among the top ten butterflyers in the state, who led quietly and by example, who spent hours each week officially and unofficially working as a math tutor, who would have been valedictorian if a C in freshman art class hadn’t knocked his grade point average down to a 3.97—third in the class—and who had grown up with nothing and now had college acceptances to Hopkins, Penn, and Yale.

The weeks spent at St. Benedict's talking with people who had taught Rob or gone to school with him were some of the most meaningful of my working life. The school is a special place. This part of the work on Rob's story in fact inspired my second non-fiction book, entitled SHOW THEM YOU'RE GOOD: FOUR BOYS AND THE QUEST FOR COLLEGE, which explores the experiences of students in different spaces from very different backgrounds as they move through high school--what it looks like and feels like to be on the cusp of adulthood right now. The paperback comes out on August 18th. I find that particular passage in life, when you are no longer young but not quite old, to be kind of astonishing in its wonder and humility.