An eclipse reunion
Former Webster teacher reunites with 100 former students to watch eclipse
Patrick Moriarty sat expectantly in a plastic chair in his Brighton driveway at 3:20 p.m. Monday as the sky darkened, the moon slipping in front of the sun behind a blanket of clouds.
“How do you guys like this?!” he said to the crowd surrounding him, who weren’t neighbors or coworkers but about 100 former students of his from decades ago. A chorus of oh’s and ah’s arose from the group, one commenting on the 360 sunset effect still visible even in the dark while another tried quickly to turn off their brightened cell phone screen.
It was a pinnacle moment for the former Webster science teacher, who’d spent over a decade sharing his passion for all things celestial with 14- and 15-year-olds, and telling them to meet him in 2024 for the total solar eclipse bound for Rochester.
Moriarty, now 68, never thought a bunch of them would actually show up at his Brighton home for the occasion.
“I thought it would be a nice little core of people who were totally into eclipses, and maybe they’d share the experience with me,” Moriarty said. “But it’s not about the eclipse anymore. It’s about this. It’s about the sharing. It’s about the impact of teachers. It’s about so much more.”
About 100 former students descended on his driveway Monday, with camping chairs, sun-shaped cookies and champagne in tow. Many wore name tags with their year of graduation.
Some used canes now. Others had their dogs or spouses with them. All of them were eager to greet Moriarty, who towered above the crowd at 6-feet-7-inches, a shock of white hair and glasses bobbing from person to person.
And he was in full science teacher mode, grabbing a corded mic several times as the eclipse drew near to comment on the dropping temperature and the cloak of darkness that would envelop the area quickly as totality took hold — “You can have almost 95% of the sun covered and not sense the change in light…but in about 15 seconds, it gets so dark that it’ll be like nighttime,” he said.
As a new teacher in the 1970s, Moriarty was sideburned, crushed on by the teenage girls and one of his students’ favorites.
“I don’t remember a lot of my teachers from back then, but he was one of them,” said Ric Mintz, who was one of Moriarty’s first students at what was then Spry Junior High School in 1978. Mintz and his wife Nancie showed up in handmade “Moriarty Eclipse Gathering” T-shirts.
“When he said we were going to meet for the eclipse and he held true to it, here we are,” Mintz said.
Kendra Denson, of Rochester, who was in Moriarty’s class in 1984, cried as the eclipse took place. Later, she stood shoulder to shoulder with old friend Jennifer Heaphy, who is a current Webster teacher, reminiscing about the time they pranked Moriarty, getting him to dash out of his classroom because Denson had, falsely, fallen down a school staircase.
“To see all the different classes join together — this was, to me, a true class reunion,” Denson said.
A hush came over the group as the climate started to feel more and more like a summer evening, the birds chirping overhead. The hodgepodge of chairs in the driveway filled with people, with Moriarty in the front row.
“Oh my God, this is so cool,” someone whispered. For three and a half minutes in mid-afternoon, the world was dark and Moriarty witnessed a phenomenon he’d been teaching about for years.
Later, he’d choke up at the thought of so many former students — some of whom were very likely uninterested or angsty teens while in his classroom — reuniting at his request so many years ago.
“Everyone wants acknowledgment in what they do,” he said. “To have that and have it be so meaningful — it’s amazing.”