GLOCESTER – On a picturesque autumn afternoon in Glocester, Albert “Al” K. Aubin, Ed.M., takes a break from sharing stories of service to the country and community, scoops a handful of peanuts and tosses them onto his deck. As soon as he closes the door, eager squirrels bound onto the deck and bluejays swoop down, and together, mammals and birds dine on the bounty. Aubin, who was last week re-elected town sergeant of Glocester, smiles at the animals and resumes reminiscing.
Aubin has served his community as well as his country for decades, and at age 88 continues to contribute.
First elected as town sergeant in 2021, Aubin, known as Al, running unopposed this year received 4,835 votes. He sought the office “to contribute to the community welfare,” its well-being, he says. Aubin has had role models that seem to have enhanced his well-being, and it might be said he is a role model himself. He works out daily, and takes walks, as well as keeps informed on current affairs, knows history, and participates in the community at many levels. Town sergeant, teacher, member or chair of town and statewide committees and commissions, and an author and historian of the French in Rhode Island, Aubin is also a military veteran.
Joining the Rhode Island National Guard in 1956 as a student at La Salle Academy, a Roman Catholic high school in Providence, and then an all male school, Aubin was in the artillery nine millimeter gun battalion during his senior year.
Training troops in artillery skills, Aubin began to experience hearing loss from the loudness of the World War II-type weapons used to knock planes out of the sky. He was 18 and not wearing the ear protectors people wear today. Eventually the disability would amount to 40 percent hearing loss.
At age 22 as a senior at Providence College, Aubin was offered a commission in the United States Army that apparently recognized his leadership potential.
Aubin was planning to serve his country in the Vietnam War, but fate or the Army had other plans for the young man.
In 1961, Aubin was commissioned into the Army’s Medical Service Corps as an executive officer stationed in Landstuhl Hospital in Germany. He was responsible for the supervising and training of a 500 enlisted men detachment. The hospital took care of troops, such as those coming in from Vietnam, and periodically Aubin was also a summary court officer and Aide De Camp to a couple of generals.
Of his Army experience he says “I loved it.” He says he enjoyed serving his country and working with “my fellow officers and the men.” Altogether Aubin would serve 14 years in the reserve and active Army.
The townspeople of Glocester and Aubin’s countless students through the years undoubtedly know him as the well-mannered and urbane gentleman with the confident bearing and fitness of a military officer, a kindly man who is meticulous in a dapper suit and tie, who carries a briefcase full of papers and pens. What people likely do not know is that Aubin’s early life wasn’t always easy.
His early life was spent both in Providence and other cities in the state — and in rural Glocester.
Aubin was born in the summer of 1938, “just before the big one,” he quipped, referring to the devastating hurricane of September of that year.
He was the oldest of nine children. Although his father was not able to help raise the children, one of whom died at birth, “I am eternally grateful to my mother,” said Al.
His mother, Doris (Cardin) Aubin, was married in Saint Lawrence church in Centredale, across from her family’s home on Woonasquatucket Avenue in 1936, during the difficult times of the Depression. Her father was French from Quebec, Canada, where the family still has relatives today.
Aubin’s family in Rhode Island was impoverished, and because of dire circumstances, they went from middle class life to “ending up in a housing project” in Providence.
At one point a social worker tried to convince Al’s mother to foster out the children. She refused. She was “keeping the family together,” Aubin said.
“My mother was influential,” in his life, he added.
Aubin said she taught her children “how to behave,” such as how to be loving and responsible, not to expect others to take care of you, to be a person of good manners, to keep up with religion, study and get an education, and to practice self-discipline.
Growing up, he realized “a man is just as responsible as a woman for a family, a man more so; he has to put a roof over the heads.” More, parents “need to be loving, secure, and discipline, all positive things.” Without a father at home “my mother had to do it all,” said Aubin.
Aubin recalls a young professor from Providence College, Patrick Conley, would visit the youngsters and their mother, carrying his thick “Summa Theologica” book by Roman Catholic saint Thomas Aquinas.
“He’s brilliant,” Aubin said of Conley. “He taught at La Salle Academy and at P.C. He was a role model for the family.”
Conley of Bristol is today well-known as a the leading Rhode Island historian and author of numerous books on the topic, as well as the founder of the Rhode Island Heritage Commission.
Little did Aubin know at that time that he, too, would go on to contribute to RI’s heritage and history.
In his youth, in the Aubin household’s apartment of only three bedrooms, the girls slept with the mother. Al slept in the parlor.
“Teens want plenty of privacy,” he said, so he studied history and other subjects in the closet.
In 1956, Aubin was a bag boy for 90 cents an hour at First National grocery store in Greenville, located in the plaza on Route 44 where Rocky’s Ace Hardware now stands.
Aubin would get a break from city life. He was a lifeguard at Watmough’s summer camp, now Holiday Acres campground in Glocester. Roy Watmough was a swimming coach and a teacher.
“That guy was a saint,” Aubin recalled. “He was a father to us.” He “took us to the summer camp, sending the bus to pick us up at home and bring us back five days a week.”
Aubin was a lifeguard and a camp counselor. In addition to swimming, in his youth he enjoyed playing baseball and basketball.
That was the age of Sputnik, the Space Race, and teachers were in demand. Aubin was an excellent scholar and was awarded a scholarship to train as a teacher.
He graduated from Providence College in 1961 and went on to earn a master’s in education from Rhode Island College in 1969 and from Providence College in 1977. His study subjects included secondary school administration and secondary education, English, and social studies. Aubin is a certified kindergarten through grade 12 teacher.
He has taught at the Community College of Rhode Island for 37 years. One of his subjects was teaching driver education, and he also trained driver ed teachers. Aubin might or might not return to teaching in the spring, and says he’s thinking about it.
He taught English and social studies at North Providence High School for ten years, and he sometimes taught in the summers at Cranston East High School.
More than 20 years ago Aubin was registering students for the drivers ed program when a woman he hadn’t seen in 30 years, a former student in his English class, a good student at that, was registering her son for driver’s ed.
That “accident in time” led to Al and Donna’s marriage in 2002. The couple married in Quebec at a French church, and the mass was in that language. For Aubin and his bride’s love of the woods and the animals that inhabit them, the couple moved to Glocester.
About a decade ago, Aubin became the archivist at his alma mater La Salle Academy. That seems apt, as Aubin is also dedicated not only to preserving the high school’s history, but to the history of the French in Rhode Island.
Aubin was a member of the Rhode Island Heritage Commission. He and others there realized they discussed the various ethnic history of the state, but not much had been written about the topic. He was chair of Franco-American Committee of the Rhode Island Heritage Commission and chairman of the Pamphlet Committee. And encouraged by colleagues in 1981, Aubin wrote the first book that launched the subsequent Rhode Island Ethnic Heritage Pamphlet Series. Now going into its third edition, The French in Rhode Island: A History was “the flagship” and it “bred a flotilla.”
It is “nice when you can breed a flotilla of books,” because as other writers saw, “if he can do it, they could do it,” Al said, holding in his hands a stack of small books, each a history of an ethnic group in the state.
Perhaps ironically, he and his siblings were not allowed to speak French, which was apparently not uncommon among ethnic groups assimilating into the American culture from the late 19th century and well into the 20th century. Aubin’s mother wanted her children focused on being Americans, or “Americanized,” as he put it.
“Each book is like a brick reinforcing people’s love of America, and the blessings of America,” said Aubin. He believes people should support the president of the United States, and that he will do great things for the country.
“Shame on them who don’t,” support the president. Aubin said.
Living his values, and with good nature that’s apparent in his smile, sparkling eyes, and ready laughter, Aubin serves his community on commissions and committees. He is a member of the Glocester Republican Committee and the chair of the Glocester Conservation Commission, as well as the town sergeant.
Albert K. Austin, Ed.M. is an intellectual and humanitarian. He enjoys feeding the squirrels and birds that visit his Glocester home. And he is a family man, enjoying the company of his wife and their children. Like a well-mannered and generous American out of a Frank Capra movie, and he is keenly up on and involved in today. He never forgot his roots, his mother and male role models who helped him in his life, and he remembers the men he served his country with, and the many students he served as their educator. Expect Aubin to keep contributing to the community and country’s well-being with a smile on his face as he moves into his ninth decade of life.
