A legacy of giving
56 years of service at Lawrence Boys & Girls Club
LAWRENCE — Billy Robertson was 11 years old when he followed the sounds of a shot put hitting a wall and met Steve Kelley in the alley separating their respective homes on Farnham and Bailey streets in Lawrence.
Robertson began retrieving the ball for Kelley, who encouraged him to visit the Boys & Girls Club of Lawrence, where he was the physical education director. More than a half century later, the Newburyport resident has assumed Kelley’s position as associate director and planned a retirement party for his lifelong friend and mentor who retired on Sept. 2, just shy of his 76th birthday.
The 400-guest celebration on Oct. 18 at Andover Country Club sold out. Former club kids — many of whom are now adults who give back as donors, volunteers, or simply by living according to Kelley’s example — traveled to the event from California, Oregon, Washington, Pennsylvania, Florida, and even Poland.
“Nobody stays in their job for 56 years, but that’s the commitment that Steve has to the city of Lawrence and its children,” said Robertson, for whom Kelley has been a basketball coach, father figure, best man at his wedding, and club peer over the decades they have shared. “If you want to talk to Steve, it’s going to be a long conversation because he takes a genuine interest in everybody and everything in their lives. He has modeled that relationship piece, which is what makes our organization so different and special.”
Methuen resident Socrates De La Cruz, an ordained minister and CEO of the DLC Law Group in Lawrence, said Kelley similarly influenced him as a basketball coach, surrogate father, academic adviser, and advocate.
“When I decided at age 10 or 11 that I wanted to be a lawyer, everyone in my family laughed at me. Steve was the only one who said, ‘You are going to be the best lawyer ever,’” said De La Cruz, recalling how Kelley took him to Lawrence District Court so he could see how attorneys dressed and acted. After Kelley greeted a judge he knew, the pair was invited to tour his chambers.
“Steve sees the best in everybody, and he believes in whatever you say you want to do — more than you believe sometimes,” said De La Cruz, whom Kelley coached to becoming the club’s first Boys & Girls Club of America National Youth of the Year, which earned them both an Oval Office meeting with President George H.W. Bush in 1991.
“As I look back, Steve is in all my club memories — and I thank God for that,” De La Cruz added. “Personally, I think the entire world should know about him.”
Kelley, a former club kid who taught at the Tarbox and Oliver schools in Lawrence before joining the Boys & Girls Club of Lawrence staff in 1966, was horrified when a fellow teacher dismissed rowdy students as unworthy of effort because “they don’t want to learn.”
“You can’t give up on a kid,” Kelley said fiercely. He turned his class around by rewarding good behavior with an annual membership to the Boys & Girls Club of Lawrence, which cost 50 cents at the time. If they agreed to trade the customary dinner break for an hour of study hall, he made them sandwiches. The requirement — which continues today — that competing in basketball is contingent upon receiving satisfactory weekly reports from school teachers was his brainchild.
“Kids have every reason in the book not to make it — absent parents, drugs, poverty — but I haven’t met a kid yet that wants to be a failure,” said Kelley, who also founded the club’s Academic Basketball, college prep, and career readiness programs. “You have to show kids how to deal with problems, while giving them a sense of direction and hope that there’s something out there for them. I tell them, ‘You’re going to make it! And they do.”
“I’m very blessed,” said Kelley. “I had a simple goal: to become a teacher. The club let me do that — and so much more.”