Marty Mullen didn't think it odd that dozens of St. Vincent Preparatory School graduates would travel from places such as Virginia, North Carolina and New Jersey to rededicate a building they lived in and learned in during their high school years.
"The place played a significant part of my life," said Mullen, a 1965 graduate who resides in Alexandria, Va. "Those of us that can make it certainly do."
Just as the Benedictine monks pulled clay from the ground and made the bricks that would make St. Benedict Hall, they also took the young men they taught inside those walls and molded them into future businessmen, military leaders and monks.
They were the "Prepsters," young men who spent their high school years at St. Vincent, many living in dormitories on the top floor of St. Benedict Hall.
They gathered at St. Vincent on Tuesday to bless and rededicate their former home as Headmasters Hall and The William C. Ucker Center after a more than $1 million restoration to the building that has been ongoing for the past year.
Since the preparatory school closed in the 1970s after more than a century, the new Headmasters Hall has been housing the college's post office, the Office of Academic Affairs and offices and classrooms for the School of Humanities and Fine Arts and the Department of Psychology.
But the building was in dire need of renovations.
The prep school graduates stepped in with contributions to not only modernize the building with amenities such as digital projectors in classrooms but also to restore its past.
The building, one of the oldest on campus, was designed and built in sections between 1855 and 1877.
The Benedictine monks cut the trees for the lumber and made bricks from the clay they dug from the campus grounds.
Those bricks, which had been covered by plaster over the years, are now visible in the interior walls throughout the building.
Wooden staircases were returned to their former splendor. But great care was taken not to simply replace worn-out sections. Instead, the ends of some stairs show the wear from more than a century.
Throughout the building, photographs of former headmasters, students and events at the school hang on the walls. A display cabinet is filled with memorabilia, from diplomas to sporting event programs to school T-shirts.
Part of the building, which was renamed The William C. Ucker Center, houses a faculty lounge. Ucker, a graduate of the prep school and college, established a trust that, upon his death in 2006, bequeathed more than $2 million to St. Vincent.
The Rev. Louis Sedlacko worked as prefect when Ucker graduated from the prep school in 1943.
Sedlacko eventually became headmaster of the school from 1956 to 1967 and, at age 90, attended yesterday's events.
"I always looked on them as kids, and now they come back as retired kids," said Sedlacko, who was greeted by many former students.
Mullen said he grew up around the prep school since his brother -- 14 years his elder -- attended classes there first.
"It really was sort of like a surrogate family, and I think the influence the Benedictines were able to have on us at that important age was very significant," he said.
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