Bob Donaldson/Post-Gazette

John A. Pidgeon, Kiski School headmaster

Jack Pidgeon, the revered headmaster of the private Kiski School in Saltsburg who inspired generations of young men under his unyielding care, died Monday of complications from Parkinson's disease. He was 83.

There is no shortage of stories about Mr. Pidgeon or people wanting to tell them. A man raised by a single mother in the Irish ghettos of Lawrence, Mass., who leveraged his athleticism to enter the monied world of New England prep schools, he ran the all-boys boarding school for 45 years, often admitting hardscrabble kids just like himself and trying to mold them into something more.

That meant discipline, six days of school per week and personal, one-on-one grade reviews with every student, every month. It meant 5 a.m. swimming practices, and coats and ties in the dining hall, but it also meant something that his former students still cannot define, often decades later.

"They don't have the word for Mr. Pidgeon," said animal expert Jack Hanna, who went to Kiski in the mid-1960s after having school trouble in his native Tennessee. "He was more than a father figure, more than an icon, more than a teacher."

He was also something of an enigma, projecting to the outside world the gruff athlete who almost made the 1948 U.S. Olympic swim team as a wounded World War II vet, while on the inside a romantic who memorized poetry and fiction, and played golf in bare feet. Apparently he looked for the same kinds of things buried deeply away inside his students, sometimes digging rather hard.

"Disciplinarian is the wrong word. He expected people to want to find their own self- respect," said actor David Conrad, a 1985 Kiski graduate who credits Mr. Pidgeon for making him an artist.

"He hated fakes, people who said one thing, but actually couldn't do those things. In his school, you swam until you dropped, worked until you couldn't anymore, had tons of homework. ... Most people don't get tested anymore. If you're not tested at a young age, you can live the rest of your life not knowing your limits or never reaching them," Mr. Conrad said.

Not only students got the treatment. After her husband died, Jan Fuellhart said he called her every day -- sometimes tracking the telecommunications executive down on business trips to London or Russia -- to support her. Every day -- for 10 years.

"He was relentless as far as not letting you get away with feeling sorry for yourself. He'd say 'That is a place you're allowed to visit, but you're not allowed to stay long,'" she said.

John Anderson Pidgeon was born in Lawrence, Mass., and raised by his mother, Nora Regan Pidgeon, who worked as a cleaning woman. He won a scholarship to Phillips Academy in nearby Andover, served in the Navy in the North Atlantic during World War II (where he broke his back during a bombing attack) and then graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine, with a degree in German.

After a short stint with U.S. Steel, he became a teacher at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, teaching German and Latin and coaching swimming and football, before becoming assistant headmaster. He left to lead Kiski in 1957.

Founded in 1888 and one of the oldest boarding schools in the country, Kiski, on the border of Indiana and Westmoreland counties, was on hard times when he arrived, with a dwindling endowment and a crumbling physical plant where teachers wore overcoats in class due to the cold. Applying the same tenacity with fund raising that he did in schooling boys, he turned the school around financially in his five decades in charge. "He was all-encompassing. He made it work," said Mrs. Fuellhart, a former Kiski board member.

The tenacity also paid off in wooing his second wife, then Allegheny County Commissioner Barbara Hafer, in 1986. After meeting her at a Kiski alumni event at the Rivers Club, Downtown, he called her office for weeks before she finally responded.

"He was a political junkie and active in politics and I wouldn't take his calls," Ms. Hafer recalled yesterday. "I didn't know what he wanted. Finally my secretary asked what he wanted to talk about and he said 'If you have to know, I want to ask her out on a date.' "

Ms. Hafer went on to become the state's auditor general and treasurer, leaving office at the end of 2004, a few months after Mr. Pidgeon had a coronary bypass. While he kept working as a swim coach at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in those post-retirement years, he increasingly had problems with his balance, and was injured in a fall at the IUP pool.

He was diagnosed with Parkinson's in January 2006 and Ms. Hafer, a former nurse, became his primary caregiver until his recent move to Indiana's Beacon Ridge nursing center, where he died Monday.

"He pushed me very hard but what he was really doing -- and this is the essence of Jack Pidgeon -- was he was teaching me how to win, how to lose and how to get back up again," said former federal appeals court judge Timothy K. Lewis of Squirrel Hill, who graduated from Kiski in 1968. "Jack Pidgeon was the greatest teacher of life I've ever known. Legions of Kiski boys will attest to that. Each represents a separate chapter in the book that is his legacy."

Actually, that book is probably "The Great Gatsby," and Mr. Pidgeon's longtime requirement that his American Literature students memorize its last page. Right now, there are likely legions murmuring, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Mr. Pidgeon is survived by his wife, Ms. Hafer; his sons, John A. Pidgeon Jr. of Great Falls, Va., and Kelly C. Pidgeon of Indiana, Pa.; daughters Regan Houser of Indiana and Beth Hafer of Pittsburgh; and four grandchildren. Mr. Pidgeon's first wife, Judy, preceded him in death.

Burial will be private. A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. June 8 on the Kiski School campus, though the family asks those attending to register with Saltsburg's Curran Funeral Home at www.curranfuneralhome.com.

Memorial contributions may be made to the Foundation for IUP's John A. Pidgeon Scholarship for Swimming, 103 Sutton Hall, 1011 South Drive, Indiana, PA 15705.