Legendary SC Lowcountry principal John Rogers leaves us with a word of advice | Opinion
The influence John Dargan Rogers Jr. had on the South Carolina Lowcountry won’t be measured in our lifetime.
He was a school principal, teacher, coach and referee — and education is a long-term investment.
In 48 years in our schools — starting at Bluffton High in 1965 and including public schools in Hardeeville and Ridgeland before 37 years as headmaster at the private Thomas Heyward Academy in Ridgeland — Rogers invested an upbeat, outgoing personality and strict discipline in thousands of students, tens of thousands of their family members, and hundreds of teachers (including me for one year).
But long before his own life ended at age 81 in his home on Lady’s Island on Nov. 29, plenty of dividends were obvious.
He saw “instant gratification” when the top two seniors in his last graduating class before retiring 10 years ago had each earned full rides to study pre-med.
And maybe, in his own sparkling-blue-eyes way, Rogers wanted us to see a long-term dividend in selecting the Rev. Tripp Daley to deliver the homily Thursday at St. Helena’s Anglican church in Beaufort. Daley was one of his students, a bucking fullback in THA’s storied football tradition.
Today, Daley is a homebuilder and pastor at Gillisonville Baptist Church.
Daley brought his booming voice and almost an altar-call revival air into the stately church that was founded before America was. He got a laugh when he said he was an odd choice for the assignment because, “I was one of his less productive students in school.”
But more than a decade after that schooling was supposed to be finished, “Mr. Rogers found encouragement for a young man who needed guidance in life.”
Others worldwide could say the same thing, Daley said, about the mentorship, inspiration and discipline Rogers gave them.
Jen Tosky, one of Rogers’ three daughters, told me the primary reaction to his death has been: “Had it not been for your father, I would not be where I am today.”
Rogers was an only child in an old South Carolina family in Columbia. He and our governor share the same family middle name: Dargan. His father was a salesman and his mother a librarian.
Her son loved reading, which informed his prodigious bank of opinions. He could be seen at the Publix in his retirement years wearing a T-shirt that read, “Think while it’s still legal.”
At his core, Rogers believed that there’s a right and a wrong and young people need to know when wrong is wrong. Maybe it was the influence of The Citadel military college, class of 1965. But when Rogers retired he told me: “It gets down to order and respect. You have disciplinary procedures in place, and you enforce them. It’s so simple, it’s alarming.”
Pastor Daley said the influence of Rogers was “often shared with that piece of kindling on his desk.”
After the funeral service, two former students — a retired Jasper County fire chief who is now a pastor, and an international commodities broker based in Okatie — laughed in recalling those paddlings — a concept that seems as ancient as the 18th-century tombstones at their feet in the churchyard.
Daley told the crowd, “He shared love with encouragement, he shared love with charity, he shared love with wisdom, he shared love with guidance, he shared love with discipline.”
Rogers stood 6-foot-3 and was for many years a referee in Lowcountry independent school gyms where tempers sometimes ran so hot they would ban fans from the building. He could make the tough call, and stand the heat, with a smile.
Rogers worried about the world his great-granddaughter will face. He feared we’re getting away from the belief that you must earn what you get in life, and that hard work will eventually pay off.
Last year, he was the commencement speaker at his old school. Beaufort native Jeanne Aimar Rogers, his wife of 42 years, said he told them to think before they act. She said his words that night will be etched into their tombstone at the St. Helena cemetery: “What you think, you do. And what you do, you become.”