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For the past
68 years, a Healy has had the job of hand-lettering BC diplomas
When young Leonard Healy '22 first began hand-lettering
Boston College diplomas, Bapst Library was still under construction,
the Law School did not exist, and the first woman to earn a degree from
the University, Margaret Ursula Magrath, was a year away from her MA.
Leonard Healy lettered Miss Magrath's name onto
the diploma she received in 1926, his second year as Boston College's
calligrapher. From those early days, the precise, graceful pen-and-ink
work that adorns tens of thousands of BC degrees has been the exclusive
preserve of the Healy family.
Healy became the Boston College calligrapher
after quitting his job as a carpet designer and traveling salesman for
a Connecticut firm. Leonard already had wielded a pen as a cartoonist
for the Stylus. When he noticed in a newspaper advertisement
that Boston College was seeking a diploma scribe, he saw an opportunity
to move into a line of work easier on the shoe leather.
He formed L.G. Healy & Co. that same year,
with an office in Dooley Square, Boston. Later, after the business had
grown (at one time, Leonard was lettering diplomas for Boston College,
BU and the Cambridge and Boston public schools, in addition to designing
and printing greeting cards), he would often bring his son James in
after school and on weekends to help out with shipping and other office
chores.
Whether it was that experience, or a simple matter
of genetic flow, Jim Healy '59 found that he wanted to keep the inking
of BC diplomas in the family. "I never had any formal art training.
I used to doodle a lot in my classes at Boston Latin Academy, and I
always tried to copy my father's style," he relates. Jim Healy
began lettering diplomas while working for another printer, then took
over L.G. Healy & Co. from his father in 1964.
Today, Healy's talents find constant and varied
outlet. He paints original watercolors, illustrates books and, like
his father, designs and prints his own mail-order greeting cards. But
each spring, when the Boston College registrar's office sends him the
list of May graduates, Healy is ready to devote the better part of two
months to the painstaking job at hand.
It is mid-April, about midway through the schedule,
and Healy has just delivered the last of some 1,450 Class of '93 bachelor's
degrees. As soon as he returns home to Dennis, Massachusetts, he will
start on the BS, graduate, and law degrees, working, as always, at his
dining room table. A professorial-looking man with a close-trimmed gray
beard and mustache, Healy will inscribe about 3,400 Boston College diplomas
before he is done for the spring. By comparison, in Leonard Healy's
first year he lettered 204 diplomas, including honorary doctorates and
graduate degrees.
Boxes of "blanks," preprinted with
the Latin phrases of academia, the eagle clutching the banner inscribed
with BC's motto, the University seal, and the president's signature,
had arrived at his home in January. By early April, Healy has run the
19-inch-by-15-inch rectangles of rag parchment through his own press,
mechanically imprinting them in script type with the appropriate degrees
and Commencement date.
His last act, the touch that evokes his artistry,
is the actual hand-lettering of each individual name plus any academic
honors.
Healy offers a quick demonstration this April
day. The Old English script customized by Leonard Healy is beautifully
simple and exact—and it takes Jim Healy no more than a minute
to inscribe a blank diploma. First, he produces a wood laptop desk he
picked up at a yard sale somewhere, opens it, and pulls out a ruler,
an ordinary No. 2 pencil, a bottle of black India ink, and a stubby
cartridge-style fountain pen. He draws faint pencil rules on the diploma,
using a practiced eye to center them beneath the Latin "Salutem
in Domino."
Next, gripping his pen—filled with a 50-50
mixture of tap water and ink—he hunches over the parchment like
a Dickensian clerk. Seconds later, he leans back, and there is a Boston
College Artium Baccalaureatum degree, magna cum laude,
for William F. Buckley. The final bit of work is delicately to erase
the pencil rules.
Little about the diploma-lettering business has
changed since his father's day, Healy admits. "There are,"
he says with a chuckle, "no electronic aids" in lettering
diplomas. "I can do about 20 an hour, and after two or three hours,
I have to get up and clear my eyes. But once I start [at the job], I'll
normally work at it every day until it's finished. I try to keep to
a schedule, and if I'm lagging behind, I'll put in more hours at night."
Those hours extend right up through Commencement
weekend, when Healy is on call to correct any last-minute mistakes or
omissions. In almost 30 years, no error of consequence has gotten past
his system of double and triple checks.
The pleasures of calligraphy are small and fleeting.
There is "a kind of satisfaction," says Healy, in starting
with a pile of blank diplomas on one side of his dining table, and seeing
it slowly diminish, while the pile of finished diplomas grows. Healy
particularly enjoys his role as calligrapher-to-the-stars: inscribing
the names of the annual recipients of BC honorary degrees.
A few years ago, his handiwork even made it (briefly)
to the silver screen. In The Verdict, Paul Newman played a fictitious
BC Law graduate named Francis Xavier Galvin, a down-and-out Boston attorney.
Although Newman's character ends up prevailing in the movie, the diplomas
does not; Newman rips it off his office wall and smashes it in a rage
of self-loathing. "I never thought I'd enjoy seeing my work destroyed,"
Healy laughs.
He has no plans to end his tenure as BC diploma
scribe. But when he does decide to quit, there just might be a third-generation
Healy ready to pick up the pen.
"My daughter Jennifer is entering her junior
year at the Massachusetts College of Art," says Healy. "She
would like to teach art eventually, but she's been doing some very nice
things with calligraphy. It would be easier to hand it to someone in
the family."
John Ombelets
Photos (from top):
Jim Healy at his desk. Photo by Gary Wayne
Gilbert
Healy demonstrates the inscription of a diploma.
Photo by Gary Wayne Gilbert
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