Former Shamrocks fondly remember time at school.

Byline: Karen Vigil

Jun. 17--President John F. Kennedy perhaps was steeling himself for the enormous responsibilities ahead when he said goodbye to the Massachusetts Legislature on Jan. 9, 1961.

He took license with a biblical quotation from the Gospel of Luke, saying: "For of those to whom much is given, much is required."

Days later in his inaugural address, Kennedy took another straight-ahead shot at his version of the verse, in a phrase that called a nation to service: "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."

Brother Frank Klapp, the founding principal of Roncalli High School in Pueblo in the 1966-67 school year, issued the same challenge to the powerhouse school's first graduating class of Shamrocks.

Klapp told the 67 graduates and their families and friends that he expected more of them than their peers leaving other high schools. Clearly, Klapp thought the extended Roncalli family of clerical and lay faculty, staff and students together had prepared the graduates to reach for and attain goals higher than their peers.

Taking a turn from Kennedy who had been assassinated 3 years earlier, Klapp told the students they should recognize that their future involved their larger family of the Pueblo community and that they should meet the challenge of "not what Pueblo will do for you, but what you will do for it."

Klapp was unabashedly confident that with the first class of graduates, the seeds of what the Marianists had planned to be a proud and storied legacy…