Our People of the Century Jose LaBoy: Vineland Attorney's Rallying Cry - Education

Jose LaBoy hasn’t forgotten the frustration of sitting in his second-grade classroom in Vineland unable to understand a word that was spoken. What was almost worse was his inability to let his teacher know what he knew.

The little boy had recently moved with his mother and brother from Puerto Rico. Six of his siblings were already in Vineland, and his father had died five years earlier.

He spent a year in what he now calls “nanno-land,” until a teacher at Cunningham School read the hurt in his eyes.

The teacher, Helen Gross, worked with him every day after school helping him to learn English.

The experience back in the late 1950s set the course he follows today.

“She made a difference in my life,” says LaBoy, a Vineland attorney. “I learned from her that I can make a difference in someone else’s life.”

Armed with the language, LaBoy did well in school—efforts that were supported and encouraged by his mother, Mercedes Serrano, now 93, and his older brothers and sisters.

Homework came before play, LaBoy says, remembering appreciatively how his mother would not allow him to go out and play baseball or toss the football around until every bit of homework was finished.

As a result, LaBoy was the first in his family to graduate from high school. While he was there, he started the Spanish Tutorial Society for Hispanic students to help each other learn academically.

Later in his first years at Glassboro State College (now Rowan University), he volunteered as a guidance counselor at Vineland High School.

“I did to other Hispanic students what my mother did to me – I told them if you don’t succeed those four years of high school, you’re not going to succeed,” he says.

Since high school, LaBoy has made a point of speaking up, sometimes loudly, but always in a respectful way, he says.

“I learned at an early age that for anyone to advance his or her cause – the cause of the community in which you live – the best tool, the best weapon is an education,” he says.

It has been his creed ever since.

He helped start a week-long orientation program at nearby colleges that would help Hispanic and other minority students get a better start in college. He recruited Hispanic students and helped them get scholarships with the Equal Opportunity Fund.

“Everywhere I went I tried to plant a seed with the hope that whoever came after me would fertilize it and continue to help other Hispanic students understand the importance of an education,” he says.

By the time he entered Temple Law School, LaBoy had more than the usual grounding in law. Faced with LaBoy, then a 13-year old eager to work in a law office as part of the Vineland Youth Corps, a Vineland attorney gave him a chance.

Martin Pagliughi gave him a chance.

“He was my mentor,” LaBoy says. “My mother, Helen Gross and Martin Pagliughi – they are the pyramid of my life.”

He chose the law, he says, because he saw it as the proper educational tool to continue doing social reform. All along he has tried to serve as a role model for other Hispanics.

LaBoy joined Legal Services, the Farmworkers Division in Camden, which had offices in Vineland and Bridgeton. He has served on zoning and planning boards, helped found the Hispanic Political Caucus, served as Vineland’s public defender and was the first Hispanic elected to the City Council in 1988.

And he’s not finished yet.

“We all have the responsibility to help other people,” he says.