In the spring of 1967, the United States was two years into an escalating conflict in Vietnam. At St. Joe’s, three students were focused on Vietnamese children who had been orphaned by the war.
Marty McAdams ’67, Angelo Bello ’69 and Bill Conway ’68 were all part of the Project Vietnam committee and worked with on-campus clubs and organizations to organize fundraising drives and rally fellow students to provide aid for the Stella Maris Orphanage in South Vietnam.
Two St. Joe’s students, by then serving in the U.S. Air Force, Lieutenant James L. Tobin ’64 and Captain Edward Essl ’55, had reached out to the St. Joe’s ROTC program, telling them of the orphans’ plight and asking for assistance.
Now preserved in the St. Joe’s Archives Collection, documentation of the community’s response to that request for help includes newspaper clippings from the time, as well as black-and-white photographs of students washing cars and holding posters.
Bello headed the Project Vietnam committee, which organized film screenings of past St. Joe’s basketball victories, charging admission to raise money for the orphanage fund. McAdams and Conway organized a car wash, while the St. Joe’s chapter of the Arnold Air Society, a professional service organization for students in the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps and the U.S. Air Force Academy, organized a “Win A Date Miss Pennsylvania” contest.
The fundraising efforts extended beyond Hawk Hill, with students from Drexel University, La Salle University, the University of Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Military College joining in.
Coverage of the students’ work appeared in papers across Philadelphia and South Jersey, including Courier-Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, City Line News and others. Together, these clippings captured both the urgency of the war and the energy of students determined to help.
Looking back nearly 60 years later, McAdams said students came together to help in any way they could.
“I think the key takeaway is that the ROTC got involved,” McAdams said. “We weren’t the only ones that got involved. We got a lot of other people involved. We threw a car wash, and I don’t know how much money we raised, but hopefully it helped.”
The students ended up raising over $1,500.
Another classmate, Richard Zanoni ’67, said most students knew about the war from what they saw on TV or read in the newspaper. After his graduation in 1967, Zanoni became a teacher before being drafted into the army.
Zanoni remembered reading about the St. Joe’s orphanage fundraising while a student on campus, and he later brought a different lens to the war. Once in Vietnam, Zanoni picked up a camera and began to document the war. A selection of Zanoni’s photographs were featured in a 2018 exhibit in Drexel Library.
“I knew that if I survived Vietnam, I got out of the Army, I was going to go back to teaching, and this was going to be living history,” Zanoni said. “Because I would have pictures, slides to show my students.”
