How Will You Love?

LET’S START THIS tribute by speaking to the loves of Al’s life. These loves, you’ll see, informed everything about him. He loved music, and never met a dance floor he didn’t want to try on for size. Al loved fly fishing, golfing (aside from the frustrating bits), walking on the beach, foraging for mushrooms. Outside, inside, anywhere at all, he loved gathering with family and friends, cherishing their blessed presence in his life. He loved his faith community. He loved God. He loved Catholic education and the opportunities it opened up for him and for others. He loved students. He loved University of Portland. He loved his friends and his family—his seven children, his 19 grandchildren, his 21 great-grandchildren. And he loved his wife of 71 years, Sue (Mayer) Corrado, who walked with him in sickness and in health.

From very early in his life, he tended to these loves, and this tending made for a beautiful life.

The great and lasting love story of Sue and Al Corrado began when they were merely teenagers. They both attended a party for high school freshman. He went to Central Catholic. She went to Holy Child Academy. As Sue remembers it, there was a ballroom on the third floor, and she recalls spotting Al out on the balcony. She went right on out there (with her impeccable instincts) to talk to him.

That conversation started a friendship that would span about eight decades. Their courtship continued through high school. By that time Al’s family had moved and he started going to St. Ignatius, the parish near Sue’s home. Sue remembers taking two buses to get to Central Catholic, so she could cheer Al on for every basketball game. At school functions, they’d dance the night away to Frankie Laine and Nat King Cole.

During his early years, Al lived in southwest Portland. His parents had emigrated to the United States from Northern Italy, and they ran a grocery store by day and a tavern by night. Al grew up thinking he’d eventually go into his dad’s grocery business. But somewhere along the line he decided to try college, something he once referred to as a “crazy idea,” one his buddy Tom Gerhardt encouraged him to pursue at University of Portland along with him.

People seemed to come to Al Corrado with ideas. Seems they knew he’d listen to them. “For all my dad’s successes,” Chris Corrado ’82 said, “his most precious gift may have been his ability to focus on the person in front of him, to give them his full attention.”

Al signed up for the Air Force ROTC program at University of Portland and worked odd jobs to pay his way. He majored in business. He was a day student—a “day dog,” as they called themselves. Al and Sue got married after his sophomore year. After Al had served two years as a finance officer for the Air Force, Tom came to Al with a new idea. Tom suggested they start a business together, and even if this may have been a touch past Al’s comfort zone at the time, he said yes. They started a company that eventually merged with another to become Columbia Management Company, where he served as a partner for more than 40 years. They had clients—individuals and institutions alike—that stayed with the company just as long. When Al gave a nod to an idea—a business plan, a marriage, a family—the idea stuck and, more often than not, it succeeded.

Another example: The diocese had bought some farmland in southwest Portland. By the late-1950s, they had land, they had blueprints for a potential church, and they wanted to know if they’d have the people. A priest approached Al and asked if he’d be able to find out if the neighbors were interested.

“Al went around the neighborhood and knocked on doors,” Sue recalls. Her own vote on having a parish nearby was a resounding “yes, please.” (Just try to imagine the wrangling involved in getting seven children into the wood-paneled Ford Pinto station wagon and driving all the way across town to get to Mass on time!) The neighbors also said yes; they, too, wanted a church in the neighborhood. And now, St. John Fisher Church and St. John Fisher Catholic School are a thriving community, 66 years strong. Al was a foundational part of making it happen, and this faith community is part of his continued legacy. Business, church-life, family-life were all thriving full-tilt when Al reconnected with his alma mater. Serving as a member of University of Portland’s Board of Regents, starting in 1991, was his next “yes.” He became Chairman of the Board of Regents in 1996, and these years were a chapter that both Sue and Al looked back on with immense fondness, a time of true camaraderie with the priests, fellow Regents, and their UP friends. Former UP President Rev. David Tyson, CSC, feels the same way. They became dear friends during this time, and he says he misses his friend Al.

Fr. Tyson recalls how Al was always ready for anything if it meant it would elevate University of Portland and the opportunities for its students. He says, “Al would give people the courage to take the teeny step forward. ‘Why don’t we just go for it, Father?’ he’d say. ‘Why not?’ He was never afraid to try.” During these years and even after his tenure on the Board, the Corrado family’s leadership and philanthropy had an immense impact on The Bluff and really on the entire city of Portland. As a day-commuter, Al didn’t get to live in a dorm himself, but he wanted others to have the experience, so he led the support for a new residence hall, dedicated in 1998. Corrado Hall was the first new dorm since 1967, and it was greatly needed as University of Portland grew. There were 82 new rooms—some would be doubles, some triples—ready and waiting to invite University of Portland students to their new home.

Al and Sue once traveled all the way to Australia to be with University of Portland students. His own granddaughter, Maddie Lowes Cois, who earned a master’s in arts and teaching at UP, was working in residence life for a study abroad program there. They were there for Thanksgiving, and they gathered the UP students for a turkey dinner. Again, creating a sort of home away from home.

The Corrado family has also supported many student scholarships and Pilot Athletics, a new boat dock for UP’s rowing team, and other campus developments and initiatives, including for the Holy Cross community. And they have been true supporters of Catholic organizations throughout the city of Portland, including Catholic Charities, Serra Club of Portland, St. Mary’s Academy, Mt. Angel Abbey, and Central Catholic High School (where the Corrado Family Library bears his name). “The Corrado name means something about community, about service, and about faith,” Fr. Tyson says.

Al’s generosity, his community efforts, his own personal magnanimity were all rooted in his faith. “I felt he had a true charism,” Chris Corrado says of his father, “a specific call by God to be someone special, to do something special in the world, to love without parameters. That’s who he was.”

Sue notes that Al was also a good listener—this skill was what made him a trusted leader at his company for so many years and a wonderful and loving father. Al saw the good in everyone. He certainly saw that in the students here at University of Portland.

In 2001, University of Portland awarded Al Corrado a well-deserved honorary doctorate of public service. He was also the commencement speaker for that year’s graduating class (among them his oldest grandchild, Samuel Angelo Corrado ’01). Al shared his origin story, and how coming to University of Portland had started as a “crazy idea.” And then he conveyed how the University had played a foundational role in the person he would become and in the values he held dear, how his time on The Bluff helped him to grow. He posed the following questions to the graduates:

          How can you serve?

          What can you give?

          How will you love?

These questions, their gentle challenge, were the questions he lived each day with humility and grace as a loving father and spouse and a servant to his community and his University.

JESSICA MURPHY MOO is the editor of this magazine.