My Flyer Family: Born and raised a Flyer

My family has left its mark all over the University of Dayton archives.

My parents, Margaret and James Gallico, boarded a train from New York City to Dayton in 1947 to start new careers as professors after leaving the Navy. My mother was hired to teach child psychology and my father taught calculus and later became an administrator with the University.

They were put up in faculty housing between the library and Sherman Hall, where a parking lot now resides. It was in one of those two-room apartments that my mother started going into labor in 1950, and I joined the Flyer family. The first four years of my life, I spent in that faculty housing before my family decided to move to Kettering.

The same year I was born was the University’s centennial anniversary and my father was in charge of getting the Saint Joseph medals for the celebration.

When I was three years old, I became a guinea pig for a daycare center on campus that my mother helped start up.

Besides devoting much of their time to the University, my parents were also avid tennis players. I remember roller skating on the old tennis courts in the grassy area below where Marycrest Hall now stands with my late sister, Margaret Gallico ’69. I still have my parents’ original, wooden tennis rackets with their initials carved into the handles including one of the tennis balls they volleyed with as well.

With so much of my life spent right there in the heart of Dayton, I wanted to go away for college and enrolled at Loyola University in Chicago. After my freshman year, I felt compelled to return to Dayton and transferred to the UD to finish my degree in psychology in 1973.

That was 50 years ago, and this June I plan to return to the campus I hold so dear. I don’t come back to Dayton often because I’m the last in the Gallico line and have no family left there, but my Golden Flyer anniversary is the perfect excuse to return to the place I spent many of my childhood and college years. 

- As told to Zoë Hill ’22